Emotion in the Home

In the home. Clearly, you know, it's got a functional side to it. It's the place where you sleep, where you eat. But it's also, for a lot of people, it's a place of emotion. Now, they can be negative emotions or positive emotions. So when we design domestic appliances, – you know – some of them are very functional, like electric kettles,

but some of them are about deliberately eliciting these emotions. So the primary focus of certainly entertainment applications in the home is about emotion and eliciting the right [sorts] of emotions. So the ideal is, rather than a place of frenzied activity, to perhaps create a place of calm. And a lot of the literature on domestic device[s] assumes that's what happens.

You know, in my experience certainly, at various points in my life, has been more about the frenzied activity. But how do we... Understanding the domestic environment, how do we create systems, which create positive emotions in that? Some of that's about the right colors, the right kind of designs, things that are pleasurable, things that do the right thing at the right time. I've got a picture here of Philips Ambilight, which is a particular television set.

The reason I’m showing it is this was one of the earliest, the earliest domestic appliance that actually used ambient color. Little lights behind the television screen, shining out, extending the image. So if it's a green football field, the room ends up green. If it's a red sunset, the room ends up red. You might have smart lights that change the color of the room, depending on your mood – either something explicit or something implicit.

So the simplest one, you just want to say, “I want the lights red.” However, you can imagine, if the system can detect your emotion, it might perhaps change that for you. Maybe deliberately go for cooling colors if it feels you’re a bit overexcited. So we have changes we can make there; they're happening. One of the other things that happens when we're face to face, but also increasingly, remotely,

is our human interactions with one another are about intimacy. It's about feeling *close* to someone. And there's different kinds of intimacy involved here. If we design for intimacy, then the primary focus is about that emotion. It's about emotion. However, here, rather than the system trying to explicitly elicit emotion, “I want to make you happy. I want to make you sad. I want to make you feel comforted.”

What the systems are trying to do is to pass on emotion from one to another, to be mediators of emotional content. So this is the kind of thing that might be very powerful if you're living a long way away from your family, from your friends, from your partner. So how do you maintain a sense of being intimate, being part of this close group when perhaps the only interactions you've got are via a video like this?

And technology has been used in different ways to try and bring people closer. So yes, there is the workaday technology. We are all used to video connections and being able to connect to people that way. And social networking, of course. Again in the same category, it's something that helps you feel connected to friends, sometimes reconnect to friends and family that you've lost track of. There's been a number of wearable and ubiquitous

technology devices that have been designed to deal with this. The first which I'm aware of is a system called In Touch, which was designed - and this is mid-nineties – two rollers in two different locations. In one of them you would move the rollers and as you move them, the rollers would move in the other place. In the other place, a person could put their hand rollers and feel that movement. So as you roll, they could feel being pulled.

And if they resisted, it would resist at your end and vice versa. So you could get that sense of being in  touch with one another at a great distance. There's been some variants that are ... well, perhaps not quite like this, perhaps for different reasons, where people have implants actually in their bodies, which give them sensations that are shared. That’s only been done at a very research level. There's also been some systems using scent. You have jewellery...

One person had a brooch on and blew towards or breathed on the brooch. Then at the other end, the other person's one would exude a smell which would give a sense of being connected. What's interesting, actually, is that I am aware of these as research systems; so far, despite the fact the earliest of these were in the nineties, I'm not aware of any of this kind of system coming to market. Now, some of that's about complexity. And if you're sitting in your office,

do you really want a waft of smell suddenly hitting your face? So there's practicalities about this. But possibly, given the problems that many people have with remote relationships, there are commercial opportunities here. There are product design opportunities here that are being missed. The researchers have moved on to other things, so to some extent, this has been left behind. So maybe this is an opportunity for you to create something new and innovative

that will change the world  and change people's lives.