Capturing, exploring and sharing peoples emotional bond with places in the city using emotion maps. -Stals, Smyth and Mival.
There is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between person, place and technology.
Focus on emotion in order to create a better understanding of people’s experience of the city and how could technology potentially play a role in augmenting this lived urban experience.
[Hacían recorridos usando dispositivos para el análisis biométrico y después con esos resultados ahondaban en la data con los propios participantes – interpretación, anotación y visualización]
The project seeks to understand how people’s experiences of places in the urban environment are meaningful to them on a personal level. (47)
Metric track: mood and emotion (MoodPanda, ComfortZones) memories (Memoir, UMap)
Increased focus on emotion and affect
There is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between people, place and technology in the urban environment (Stals, Smyth Ijsselsteijn, 2014). To this end, there has been an increased focus on emotion and affect to create a better understanding of the urban lived experience and to argument people’s experience of the urban environment.
They algo point to feelings, affections and moods as the features that are currently missing in order to be able to define and transform a space into a hybrid space. (Matassa and Simeoni, 2014)
Each participant was asked to interpret and contextualize their own data after the walk, which were subsequently combined into and annotated “emotional map” of the city. These emotion maps were also filled with personal stories and emotions, indicating people’s strong and meaningful personal connection with certain places in the city.
Places that are meaningful to people on a personal level could provide a suitable lens for further investigation, as these places are typically the places that a person has a strong emotional bond with. (50)
Exploring emotion and person-place relationships in the urban environment
Place is defined as a meaningful location (Lewicka 2011), Place meaning developing from people’s positive and negative experiences and emotions in places (Manzo 2005) which can result in place attachmentm a multidimensional concept which characterizes the emotional relationship between individuals and their important places. (Low and Altman 1992)
Investigate how people would like to capture their experience of a personally significant place, the different forms this data could take and the potential for sharing this personal data with other people that the participant has different types of social relationships with.
Method of data corpus: Walking and talking method (ethnographic)
Plutchik emotion wheel: contains oight basic human emotions depicted by different colours, each divided in three different intensity levels. It offers participants a lightweight means of explicitly verbalizing their different emotions and emotion intensities associated with different places.
Potential participants: ages 18 and 70 living in edinburgh for at least two years. This two year minimum is to ensure that participants ave had the time and opportunity to create personal relationships with places in the city.
Sample: 40
For participants there is not just one emotion connected to the experience of each personally significant place, but there can be multiple different ones [Cómo crear las bases de datos para múltiples datos en una sola casilla?]
[AFER – Facial Expression recognition software]
Emotion Maps
Originated in 1950s from the situationist movement.
Christian Nold.
What GPS unfortunately cannot do, is tell you what a person’s emotional experience of that location is, let alone the quality or cause of that experience.
The paper aims to asses the suitability of emotion maps when it comes to visualizing, exploring, sharing and communicating a person’s emotional experience of, and relationship with personally meaningful locations in the urban environment. The aim is to highlight the important aspects and limitations that one needs to be aware of when aiming to use emotion maps as means to create a better understanding of the urban lived experience, or to communicate the emotional experience of a place or a person’s personal relationship with a place to other people.
Type of sensors to collect emotional data: technical sensors, human sensors and crowdsourced data (Resch et al, 2015). Technical: automatically collect quantitative, objective, biometric data using wearable technology; human sensords enable the qualitative, subjective measurement of people’s emotions (Interviews, emotion wheel); crowdsourced data collected using an algorithm to crowdsource and automatically rank geo-located social media data into emotional categories.
Emotion maps or arousal maps?
Christian Nold: Bio Mapping Project and Emotional Cartograhpy Project. These maps are more arousal maps than emotional maps, the dots only indicate heightened arousal levels at certain locations in the city, not the actual emotions experienced by the participants at that place. Sensors are not able to correlate biometric data with a persons actual emotions (Picard 2000)
They also not give indication regarding the cause of the arousal and could very well be related to the physical activity of walking rather than a participant’s personal relationship with a place. The map is printed on paper, it is static and not interactive. As a result, personally significant places cannot be added to or removed from the map, nor can the emotional experience of personally meaningful places be updated or traced across time. This is a limitation, as the emotional experience of persoon’s personally meaningful place do not remain stable, but can evolve over time (Stals Smyth and Mival 2017)
Emotion maps based on emotional categories
Matassa and Rapp designed and developed a concept for a smartphone app for cyclists called UMap. Registers contextual data both automatically and by self-reporting. Sensors in the mobile phone are used to automatically collect quantitative data contextual data such as time, GPS location and weather conditions. Additional qualitative data such as emotions, notes and media in the form of pictures and videos are not automatically registered, but can be added manually by the user. (55. super importante ver las imágenes de la página).
The emotion categories on an emotion map are typically visualized by assigning a different colour to each of the emotions. The different emotion categories are depicted by different coloured circles on the emotion map. The size of the circly could then be used to, for example, depict the intensity of the emotion linked to the memory in that place. Furthermore, the emotion map is interactive, allowing memories and places to be added and removed, and the emotion connected to a place to be changed, thus taking into account the temporality of emotions. (56)
However, it appears incorrect to asume that there is only one emotion connected to a person’s experience of their personally significant places and typically only allow one emotion to be linked to a place on the map, regardless of the fact if it is the emotion map of an individual. Initial analysis showed that for participants there can be between two and seven different emotions connected to the experience of a personally meaningful location. These emotion maps thus currently appear to oversimplify the complexity of the emotional experience of a place due to technical limitations or for visualization purposes.
Emotion maps as speculative design
Little research has been conducted on how these emotion maps, once created, could potentially be relevant to other people. Emotion maps can act as a mnemonic trigger and as a therapeutic instrument for self-reflection. (Leahu, Schwenk, Sengers, 2008)
Matassa and Rapp aim to use the emotion map as a tool to strengthen the bond between a person and their own personally significant places with the aim to raise engagement.
The emotion map contains different types of positive and negative emotions connected to specific locations and areas in the city, with each emotion indicated by a different colour.
One of the limitations of emotional maps is that they typically provide a top-down, visual representation of the city and the emotions experienced at a personally meaningful place.
All the proposed arousal maps were strictly visual representations. The proposed linking of digital media to locations on the map such as pictures and videos, are predominantly visual media as well. Other modalities could potentially be used in a speculative design approach as a means of provocation, to create a conversation piece to investigate with participants (59)
Conclusions
Although emotion maps and arousal maps currently do not accurately capture and represent the profound, complex emotional bond that people have with personally meaningful places in the city and may even oversimplify this complexity fue to limitations in technology [Importancia de los deep maps y las capas]
Emotion maps could help to create a better understanding of the personal, emotional relationship that people currently have with personally meaningful places in the city.