We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-related gestures as input, rendering a message background of colours, shapes and animations expressing the emotional content. The design intent behind eMoto was that it should be engaging physically, intellectually and socially, and allow users to express themselves emotionally in all those dimensions, involving them in an affective loop experience. In here, we describe the user-centred design process that lead to the eMoto system, but focus mainly on the final study where we let five friends use eMoto for two weeks. The study method, which we name in situ informants, helped us enter and explore the subjective and distributed experiences of use, as well as how emotional communication unfolds in everyday practice when channelled through a system like eMoto. The in situ informants are on the one hand users of eMoto, but also spectators, that is close friends who observe and document user behaviour. Design conclusions include the need to support the sometimes fragile communication rhythm that friendships require -expressing memories of the past, sharing the present and planning for the future. We saw that emotions are not singular state that exist within one person alone, but permeates the total situation, changing and drifting as a process between the two friends communicating. We also gained insights into the under-estimated but still important physical, sensual aspects of emotional communication. Experiences of the in situ informants method include the need to involve participants in the interpretation of the data obtained, as well as establishing a closer connection with the spectators.

The topic of Materials has recently surfaced as a major theme within the research field of interaction design. In this paper we further discuss the need for in-depth descriptions of specific design cases, by revisiting some of our own research-through-design efforts when working with new or not yet fully explored materials for mobile interaction. We outline a series of design challenges that we see commonly arising in this domain, divided into three general themes; 1) affordances of hardware and casings, 2) experiential properties of different software solution, and 3) material properties of sensors, radio-signals, and electricity. Our main conclusion is that research in interaction design needs an extended focus on how systems are crafted from and together with properties of digital materials, and how new knowledge gained from those processes can be shared.

We propose that an interactional perspective on how emotion is constructed, shared and experienced, may be a good basis for designing affective interactional systems that do not infringe on privacy or autonomy, but instead empowers users. An interactional design perspective may make use of design elements such as open-ended, ambiguous, yet familiar, interaction surfaces that users can use as a basis to make sense of their own emotions and their communication with one-another. We describe the interactional view on design for emotional communication, and provide a set of orienting design concepts and methods for design and evaluation that help translate the interactional view into viable applications. From an embodied interaction theory perspective, we argue for a non-dualistic, non-reductionist view on affective interaction design.

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How can deep understandings of material properties, limitations and possibilities be used concretely as a resource in the design of embodied experiences? How can material explorations spur and potentially direct, inspire, open up for new technologies and innovations? How can we identify, develop, and polish desirable core mechanics for embodied experiences and what kind of mobile services can be built with these experiences?In this position paper we describe our idea of experiential artifacts, and how we think these can help us open up the design space of the next generation of physically engaging mobile technologies.