Recap
Over the past few weeks, our project has been focused on exploring the nature of our emotions in our interpersonal relationships. We communicate very often via social media and we chose WhatsApp as the virtual space to explore. From the first deliverable, we decided that our hidden data would be the emotions and feelings conveyed with emojis and additionally, their ability to describe interpersonal relationships over time.
Within a week, we collected the different emojis we sent to our friends and how many times we sent them. While coding our results we discovered that even though we each used emojis differently and concerning our contexts, there were also some similarities with use. So we created a persona as a fictional representation.
Persona
We iterated our persona in this phase. Tom is a 23 years old student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is employed as a working student in an international IT-Company and cares about being in a social circle. Generally, he is stressed with his 20-hour job and university and often forgets to write to his friends and family that are truly important to him. He would like to have a visual way that displays an overview of the interpersonal relationship and possibly reminds him to communicate with his friends and family.
Emoji categorization
Having this persona in mind, we collected the most commonly used emojis relating to our persona and categorised these emojis into the different emotions they conveyed as well as the intensity of these emotions. As such we settled on four main emotions: Anger, Love, Sadness and Happiness with anger and love at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
Material Exploration
Using these emotions as an anchor, we began to explore materials that may relate to these emotions. We questioned ourselves on which materials would trigger these emotions in each of us and organised the materials in this manner. Anger was associated with metal. Love associated with bed covers and wood. Sadness was associated with water flowing down the drain and finally, happiness was associated with fleece and also wood.
Research
However, we recognized that emotions are subjective and decided to gather more opinions and insights. To do this, we conducted short interviews with 7 people on their associated haptifications with emotions and why they associated the particular material with the emotion. We discovered that
Anger was associated with
- fire because it is hot and painful,
- sheet metals because it reminded them of cars and heavy traffic
- cardboard because it reminded them of moving boxes
- boiling water as a metaphor of “boiling with anger”
Love was associated with
- warm skin because the interviewee loved body contact
- wood because it appeared warm
- fur because they related it to love of pets
- fluffy fabric
Sadness was associated with
- ashes because the interviewee associated it with death
- paper towels to wipe away tears
- black fabric which reminded of sorrow
- cold metal and cold glass
Happiness was associated with
- air because the emotion gives them a light feeling
- grass because it reminded them of summertime
- sand because they related it to the sea and beaches
- cardboard as in receiving packages
- polished concrete as they related it to something smooth and comforting
Further Explorations
From this exercise, we discovered that categorizing emotions to materials is very subjective; however there was one material that stood out because of its versatile nature. This was water. We could argue that water could be manipulated into states of haptification in order to represent an emotion. The use of temperature, physical structure and colour could be used to manipulate the behaviour of water to associate it with the four emotions.