Atmosphere design and evaluation in creative collaborative projects

The past years have seen deep changes in development strategies of interactive systems in which human feelings play an important role during the design process. According to this, interactive systems have to be designed to convey feelings and moods reflecting the mental model of their visitors in supporting their interaction activities. This approach recognizes the interdisciplinary and intercultural contribution of each stakeholder involved in the design process. In a collaborative design team, stakeholders have skills and experiences in different fields such as hard sciences (HCI, computer science, software engineering, ergonomics) and humanities (semiotics, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology and psycho-analysis), and each stakeholder owns specific knowledge that is crucial to the collaboration. Combining their different points of view and contributions, the stakeholders embed in the system under design positive emotions according to the domain context in which the project is grounded. We call this design process “atmosphere design”. Our research extends Verplank’s model of interaction design and the concept of emotional design proposed by Norman, taking in consideration the interaction process at the base of the user activities. Starting from these two views, we focus our research on the study of how the user is emotionally involved through the exchange of information with the system and how the elements in the interface are able to trigger these emotions. The design process on interactive systems has to be addressed to embed a specific atmosphere, able to communicate which emotions have be triggered in the users during the interaction with the elements of the system and that will be interpreted according to their cultures, interests, and contexts of use. Atmosphere is felt by the users, according to three different levels of perception and comprehension: reactive, interactive, and cognitive. In order to evaluate the effects of the atmosphere embedded in interactive systems, we extended and redefined a semiotic method of analysis (Communicability Evaluation Method - CEM). This extension focuses on the evaluation of feelings and moods captured during users’ interaction with the systems and is aimed at understanding if designers successfully communicated to the users the desired atmosphere.