Workshop at CHI 2025 - Call for Participation

This workshop aims to situate affective interaction (with artifacts, technologies and systems) in a social and cultural context. Owing to this situatedness, affective interaction is interpretable by people. In contract, affective computing is defined in terms of its reliance on universal emotions that are natural-kind and interpretable by machines.

We invite the CHI community to join us for this workshop to discuss past, present and future of affective interaction and affective computing. To participate, please submit a 300-word paragraph, or a maximum 2 page position paper (Extended Abstract in the ACM Conference Proceedings Primary Article format). Participants are invited to present a research, design or art project in their submission and reflect on one or more challenges specified in the workshop call.

Submission deadline: 28th February 2025

Notification of acceptance: 21st March 2025

Workshop discussions will focus on conceptual foundations and theory of, or related to both Affective Computing, and Affective Interaction, methods for discussing and understanding implications and ethics of each, trans-disciplinary collaborations, case studies and technology critique, future directions and issues arising from various approaches to affect in AI. We propose to collectively pursue an understanding of Affective Interaction and ask questions that can form and inform a future research road map in HCI across a range of domains such as healthcare, work, education, and more. We plan to bring together a substantial group of researchers to discuss their perspectives, and reflect on a wide range of technology research and design exemplars. We hope to contribute to shaping a strong articulation of past and future HCI research that acknowledges affect and emotions as complex, embodied, socially and culturally situated.

To achieve these goals, we will scaffold critical engagement and reflection on the following six challenge:

Challenge 1: The science of affect

We seek to shed light on conceptual foundations of affect in Affective Interaction and Affective Computing by drawing contrasts between them, as well as well potential for leveraging their complementary foci. We want to “name” an alternative approach to Affective Computing, so that the next generation of scholars can see that perspective as a choice.

Challenge 2: Affective need, harm

and wellbeing

The area of mental health and wellbeing in HCI is rapidly growing and a variety of systems for the self-management of wellbeing are popularized. This calls for a continued exploration and measurement of complex affective needs and goals prior to developing affective technologies. Failure to do so in design may result in failure to identify and anticipate affective harm such as distress and trauma caused by technologies.

Challenge 3: Affective value

There have been philosophical arguments that values and affect are deeply interlinked. This perspective has been under-explored in both Affective Computing and Affective Interaction. If emotions are deeply linked to our sense of values, then our unique belief systems would offer an expansive basis for exploring and understanding emotional responses.

Challenge 4: Emotion evaluation

and emotion tracking

Widely accepted views on core affect and basic emotions are seen within a number of popular HCI practices. Basic emotion representations are included as design features in many personal technologies such as emotion and mood tracking apps. Affective Computing which widely influenced the field is based on the natural-kind view of emotions; the assumption that core affect can be measured through coordinated changes in sensory, physiological, motor and perceptual functions, and elicited the same as basic emotions (e.g. anger, happiness). The new perspectives on emotions challenge many of these trends.

Challenge 5: Emotion AI and data

The evolving science of emotion and affect has implications for AI technologies and generative platforms that center these concepts, claiming emotion detection based on data sources and promising experience personalization and enhanced communication in key domains such as work, healthcare, education, creativity, accessibility or security. These claims have serious sociotechnical and ethical implications such as privacy violations due to persuasive data harvesting demands, surveillance or emotional labor. Nuances in context, culture of emotion expression, language, neurodiversity, to name a few, challenge this confidence and therefore create an urgency for HCI research to reconcile with advances in the science of emotion.

Challenge 6: Affect, embodiment

and the more-than human

We want to bring together the collective of researchers who integrate the Affective Interaction approach in their research, where technologies support a more diverse and embodied spectrum of affective experience. Affective Interaction is situated within a largely phenomenological understanding of embodiment and bodies. It seems that an affective approach might simultaneously lead to an expanded exploration of the human body, and its potential to open up to the non- and more-than human. The challenge, however, is how this dual nature of affect might be instrumentalized within HCI and design.

The Miro Board used in the workshop can be accessed here

Position Papers