Course contents
The course will start with a set of lectures (some by invited guest lecturers) laying out the foundations in:
· Affect and cognition (Damasio, Cline, OCC-model, etc)
· Neurology
· Affect as expressed by bodily behaviors (Laban), speech (Cowie et al.), facial expressions (Ekman) in humans
· The role of affect in games, narratives, (Persson et al.)
· Affective interactive system examples (Paiva et al, Picard et al., Höök et al., and others)
· Methods for developing affective interactive systems (prototyping with tiny fingers, Wizard of Oz studies, user and function analysis, etc.)
Participants in the course are then required to work with developing project ideas using methods such as:
· how to describe and understand characteristics of the end-user group (e g Cooper, 1999),
· brainstorming, such as Random Words(http://www.randomwordgenerator.com/index.html),
· early idea evaluation, such as Six Thinking Hats (deBono, 1985),
This will result in a project description that should be referring back to the theoretical literature on affect and interaction. This project description will be the examination for the first 2 credits of the course. The course will then mainly be driven by the project work that the students implement in close collaboration with an interdisciplinary teacher team (interaction designers, HMI-experts, and software developers). The project will require lightweight user studies, workshops for interaction design and independent programming/simulation work. The project will be examined from all three perspectives, rendering another 3 credits. Typical methods for these three phases of the project will be:
· user-centred design, such as Contextual Design(Beyer and Holzblatt, 1999) providing real-life (light-weight ethnography) input to the specific scenarios or into specific settings, such as the home (Gaver and Dunne, 1999),
· early (drama and paper-based) development of ideas for user-testing, such as Prototyping with Tiny Fingers (Rettig, 1994) or drama (Iacucci et al., 2002),
· design approaches, such as making use of ambiguity for open interpretation of affective expressions (Gaver et al., 2003)
· fake system testing for end-user interaction, such as the Wizard-of-Oz method (Dahlbäck et al, 1993, Andersson et al., 2002)