Ph.D. Thesis - Incorporating Affect into the Design of 1-D Rotary Physical Controls
July 26th, 2007
Colin Swindells, University of British Columbia (2007)
Colin recently defended his Ph.D. research on ways to measure and elicit emotional responses, such as surprise, fear, anger, and acceptance, from physical manual controls. The visceral emotional reactions that users have to technologies are increasingly understood to be important in terms of safety, performance, and pleasure in its own right. The thesis systematically explores users’s emotional (affect) reactions to everyday physical manual controls, in order to inform a design process that considers appropriate affective response as well as performance relationships.
Design of both mechanical and emerging mechatronic physical controls are addressed through a novel design process that includes parameterizing second order (inertial) dynamics using a system identification technique, and rendering models on a custom force- feedback knob.
The thesis also examines biometric and self-reported measures of the affective responses elicited by these dynamics, and develops an iterative prototyping tool for rapid refinement of the “feel” of physical controls. This research impacts use of the passive physical interfaces such as mechanical knobs and sliders that are already ubiquitous in our everyday environments, as well as the active physical controls that are emerging in embedded computing environments such as cars, games, and medical devices.
One use for this technology is to enhance collaborative interfaces with haptic feedback that conveys a sense of the participants’
emotional states. The supervisory committee was Kellogg Booth, Karon MacLean, and Joanna McGrenere. Colin is currently working with Incaa Designs on novel pen and paper computing. Incaa Designs is the research branch of Adapx (http://www.adapx.com/).
Thesis: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/pubs/
ColinSwindellsPhDThesis_07March2007.pdf
Website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell
Photo: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~swindell/colin_swindells.jpg
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