The Future Feelings Lab explores alternative ways of feeling with technology and interactive systems—whether we are critically reimagining Emotion AI, designing a queer archive of feelings, breathing with plants and their colonial histories, or prototyping novel embodied experiences with heat. We design and build new technology, critically study the social impacts of technology, and reimagine more just futures with technology, in ways that embrace and leverage human feelings and embodiment as our soft and squishy superpowers for fostering situated, diverse, multicultural, multispecies flourishing.
Society needs better ways to design technology to be ethical and inclusive. We need better stories, better visions to build toward, about alternative future and present possibilities with technology to better support diverse emotional, embodied experiences that comprise living a good life. For this, emotion, embodiment, and imagination are essential.
Emotion and embodiment are essential to ethics. Our sentience always involves emotion and embodiment, whether someone feels frustrated or patient while writing computer code, feels excited with heart pounding during VR gameplay, hugs a loved one, or types a work email in a professional yet cordial tone. We learn from our emotional, embodied experiences in the world about how to behave ethically–deeper than a set of rules, unethical behavior feels wrong by hurting ourselves or others in the short or long term. On the other hand, computational models of the world, notably AI and sensor systems, perceive and learn about the world in ways fundamentally different from humans, making technology ethics challenging. Despite the hype of Hollywood portrayals, if we ground our discussion in how computing technology actually works at a computer science level, computing systems have no emotion and no embodiment in the way that humans do. Without these emotional, embodied experiences of pleasure, pain, guilt, and a myriad of other complex lived experiences situated in sociocultural contexts, computing systems fundamentally have no conception of right or wrong. This motivates a growing body of research on technology (and especially AI) ethics, including our work in the Future Feelings Lab to help technology designers leverage the unique strengths of human emotions and embodiment to develop more effective, ethical technologies and Human-AI collaborative systems.
Our work in the Future Feelings Lab leverages the power of emotion, embodiment, and imagination for technology ethics by developing and imagining novel technological, emotional, embodied experiences. We advance this mission in a variety of ways.
Decolonial more-than-human design: Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The installation invites embodied interactions with three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. Through this, we offer three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness.
Queering HCI: Button Portraits explores, how can tangible, wearable design encourage affective, embodied reflections on queer history? Button Portraits invites individuals to listen to oral histories from prominent queer activists by pinning archival buttons to a wearable audio player. We offer the following design directions: (1) designing tangible archives of feeling; (2) queering tangible, wearable interactions in design; (3) designing for personal, archival experiences; and (4) designing within difference. Through this work, we foreground queer stories to affect emotional reflections on marginalized histories, entangling the complex connections between bodies, feelings, histories, and shared queer experiences.
Queering/Cripping HCI: Queering/Cripping Technologies of Productivity offers three design manifestos that start from our queer, crip experiences to resist dominant designs and practices of productivity. Through our manifestos, we explore tensions in glitching three technologies of productivity (Mendeley, Figma, and ChatGPT) by reorienting their intended uses and design scripts. By sharing our perspectives and design processes, we invite new ways of relating to technologies of productivity, offer design provocations for queering and cripping technologies in HCI, and call for building intersectional coalitions that contribute towards a slow, non-linear resistance.
Thermal Interactions: By developing novel embodied interactions with heat, we create new media to gain insights into how people perceive and engage with the world. We approach this in a variety of ways, going back to debates in philosophy, the arts, media theory and computer science in its early days, as well as augmenting human perception by considering human perceptual and bodily mechanisms. This work (1) contributes novel techniques for thermal experience that are uniquely fast-switching, non-contact, and spatial, (2) deepens our understanding of human thermal perception, and (3) advances beyond HCI’s traditional emphasis on the mind and hands toward designing for sensorial embodied experience as a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself.
Critically reimagining Emotion AI: Emotion AI is a controversial set of techniques aiming to use biometrics (measurements about people’s bodies and behaviors) to predictively categorize people’s emotions. While a human can feel happiness as an emotion and embody that with a smile, Emotion AI can only recognize patterns in data, such as analyzing facial imagery for upturned lip corners or detecting an elevated heartrate. Biometrics reduce humans to numbers, and Emotion AI reduces the diversity of human emotional embodied experiences into abstract categories. While numbers and categories support comparisons, analyses, and predictions at scale, they can also ignore cultural and social meaning and encode unethical bias. Emotion AI applications are rapidly expanding into many areas such as education, work, hiring, and security. This creates grave risks of harm, where anyone whose emotions, body, or behaviors are outside the computationally-encoded box is marked as under-performing, abnormal, or a potential security threat. To address these issues, our work in the Future Feelings Lab synthesizes Emotion AI applications and risks. We offer tactics for leveraging emotion and embodiment to make AI and biometrics more ethical and inclusive. For example, our lab’s work (in collaboration with others) offers the concept of lived data–which combines lived experiences with the data referring back to those lived experiences–in an award-winning CHI paper. We also build interactive public art to prompt critical discussion around Emotion AI surveillance in public space, which has been awarded a Google AI grant. Through this, we contribute tactics, conceptual lenses, and policy recommendations that technology designers can use for more ethical biometric and AI systems.
Leveraging imagination for technology ethics: Tracing histories of science fiction and technological advancements reveals how imagination drives technological innovation. Before robots with AI were real, there were stories imagining them set in alternative futures that explored un/ethical and beneficial/harmful possibilities. Our work in the Future Feelings Lab advances design futuring, which leverages design to explore alternative future possibilities as a means to reflect, debate, comment on, and seek to change the present. To develop more ethical, inclusive, and beneficial technological systems, imagining innovative possibilities is essential. We need better stories about future possibilities with technology. We need to imagine, tell, and work toward these stories. Analyzing stories as fables, we in the Future Feelings Lab (in collaboration with others) advance fabulation as an approach for design futuring. Fabulations imagine alternative possibilities with close attention to emotion, embodiment, and ethics by drawing on a theoretical foundation in critical feminist technoscience. We have offered exemplar fabulations focused on reimagining more ethical and joyful possibilities with biometrics, hosted a workshop on fabulation for the Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes), and delivered the keynote talk at the Nordic Fabulation Network conference.