FCJ-137 Affective Experience in Interactive Environments

Ubiquitous computing is rapidly reconfiguring the physical, social and digital spaces we inhabit, thus altering our affective experience of the world we live in. This development calls for a renewed understanding of what happens when living with interactive technologies becomes an integral part of the way we experience the world. This understanding feeds into the theoretical and practical work of experience-oriented interaction design. In this article, the concept of affect as it has been developed in the philosophy of Brian Massumi is used to analyse these new fields of experience, making it possible to imagine future interaction designs experimenting with our affective experience of interactive environments. The theoretical vocabulary is used to analyse the experiential field of the interactive installation City Voices in affective terms. City Voices actively engages people in the exploration of, and interaction with, the installation, altering the affective tonality of the cityscape. The interactive technologies deployed create conditions of emergence for a range of relational events. Building on this analysis the article proposes the Massumian vocabulary as a rich field of questioning for the future analysis and design of interactive environments.