Push me, shove me and I show you how you feel

Abstract

The mood or emotional state you are in colours the way you interact with people and systems. Future interactive systems need to recognise emotional aspects in order to be truly adaptive. We designed an alarm clock, which elicits rich expressive behaviour and demonstrated that it is able to read your mood from the way you set it. We validated film clips, used them to induce moods after which participants had to set the alarm clock. From the dynamic setting behaviour we inferred parameters from which we calculated equations to identify the mood. The results illustrate the importance of a tight coupling between action and appearance in interaction design, through freedom of interaction and matching inherent feedback.