Title:
Affective experience as a theoretical foundation for experience-oriented interaction design

Abstract:
In my PhD project I want to contribute to the theoretical foundation for designing interactive and digital technologies as an increasingly integrated and complex part of our physical, social and cultural reality. I want to develop a design vocabulary to describe how we as humans experience the world based on the concept of affect as it is presented in the work of philosopher Brian Massumi. This knowledge will be tested out as a theoretical foundation for processes dealing with experience-oriented interaction design.

The project has two general research problems that overlap in the coming together of the PhD thesis. The first research problem is concerned with theory building in interaction design; the second research problem is concerned with how this knowledge might be used in a design practice:

How can we use the concept of affect to describe humans and human experience (bodily as conceptual) as a theoretical starting point for experience-oriented interaction design?

How can we experimentally address new modalities of affective experience in a design practice and how will it affect the experiential design of new interactive environments?