News!

Extended deadline for submissions.

In answer to requests the scope of the workshop call has been extended to include contributions that are not demoable yet but describe ideas for novel evaluation methods as well as papers of a more theoretic nature. Because of this change the deadline for submissions has been extended to Friday 2 December and the deadline for notification to authors has been pushed back to Tuesday 6 December.

Poster session

There will be a poster session during one of the workshop days where everyone that wishes to present their work, is welcome to do so. Hence, don't forget to bring along your posters!

Programme updated

The workshop programme is now available in the programme section of this site.

Workshop location changed

The workshop location has been changed. The new location is the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in Kista. Information about how to get there can be found under the travel and venue sections of this site.

Call for Contributions

WP9 Workshop on Innovative Approaches for Evaluating Affective Systems

Organizers:

Kristina Höök and Jarmo Laaksolahti, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Royal Institute of Technology/Stockholm University, Sweden, {kia, jarmo}@sics.se
Katherine Isbister, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, U.S.A., isbisk@rpi.edu

There is strengthening interest within the HCI community in designing affective engagement with interfaces. Affect is an important part of user engagement with games, interactive narrative, synthetic characters and robots, wearables, voice interfaces, and many other interactive systems.

But how do we determine whether someone has been affected emotionally in the way we'd like, by interacting with a system? How do we test affective responses early in the design cycle-what kinds of prototyping are appropriate? Where do traditional HCI methods fall short? What new techniques and advances can be used to improve the design and evaluation cycle for creating affective interfaces?

This two and a half day workshop brings together researchers and industry practitioners in the area of affective interface design and evaluation. The workshop is a follow-up to the successful workshop on "Evaluating Affective Interfaces - Innovative Approaches" held at CHI 2005. The workshop aims to:

The focus of the workshop is on practical application and use of novel design/evaluation methods. The workshop is organized by the HUMAINE Network of Excellence funded by the EU. Members of HUMAINE are welcome to attend the workshop with or without a submitted contribution. Researchers and practitioners that are not members of HUMAINE are also invited to attend but are required to submit a contribution to the workshop.

Selected authors will be invited to submit a revised version of their workshop contribution to a special issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS). More information about submission details for the special issue will be provided when the information is available.

The workshop will be held in the city of Stockholm, Sweden.

Submission/registration information

We invite submissions on novel methods/techniques for designing and evaluating affective systems, in particular methods that are grounded in user-centred design. Submissions should consist of a brief, 2-4 page paper describing the method/technique. In addition authors of accepted papers will be required to set up a "mini -evaluation" session where workshop participants can use the method/technique to evaluate some affective artefact. Hence authors of accepted papers are encouraged to bring a suitable object of study to the workshop that their methods will be used on. In addition the workshop organisers will arrange for a variety of systems and designs to be available for this purpose.

Examples of affective evaluation techniques might include (but are not limited to): biometrics, questionnaire design, video analysis, focus groups, participatory design strategies. The focus should be upon how this technique allows you to gauge users' affective reactions to your system, toward more effective design.

Submissions should be sent by email as an attached PDF file to wp9ws@sics.se. The subject of the email should be contribution.

Registration to the workshop is done by filling out the webform at http://www.sics.se/interaction/wp9ws/registration.php

Preliminary workshop programme

Day1: January 9th 2006

Workshop participants will be introduced to a set of freshly generated affective application paper prototypes from a HUMAINE internal event held right before the workshop. Participants will be asked to evaluate and brainstorm around the prototypes using user centred methods. We'll use methods such as Bodystorming to do this. That is participants will bring the paper-prototypes out into the settings where we imagined that they would be used and brainstorm around the idea in situ. During the day experiences from the preceding brainstorming session will be presented, in particular concrete experiences of how certain methods worked out and what they might be good/bad for.

Day2: January 10th 2006

The second day of the workshop will be devoted to the methods proposed by the workshop contributors. Typically each method is described shortly, 10 minutes or so, and then it is briefly tried out by all workshop participants - each method is set up with some application that is tested and workshop participants go from one method-station to the other.

Day3: January 11th 2006 (half day)

The third day will be spent reflecting on the methods we've tried. What worked and what did not. We will discuss topics such as: evaluation criteria, measurements, reusing old methods and new methods for creating usable affective interactive systems

Important dates