Designing Emotionally Intelligent Machines
We channel our anxieties across social media. We name our Roombas. We confide in our voice assistants one moment, shout at them the next. Our phones are the most personal of possessions, allowing us to access memories and shift identities at a swipe.
We don’t always know what to call it but it’s that feeling when technology shapes our inner life, not just our day-to-day habits. Our relationship to technology, whether we are ready to admit it or not, is emotional. The problem is that relationship is one-sided. Machines have IQ, but not much EQ. That’s about to change with the introduction of emotion-aware artificial intelligence.
Emotion AI is poised to fundamentally change how we experience technology. It will also change how we design. Emotionally intelligent design that recognizes, reflects, and respects the emotional layer of experience is the next big movement in design.
In this talk, we’ll look at some of the first emotion-aware technologies and the implications for design.
