Fragile: a case study for evoking specific emotional responses

Designers and artists often seek to evoke specific, nuanced sets of emotional responses [1], but attempting to predict the reaction of a given target audience can be daunting. As a first step, it is helpful to create prototypical systems of objects and interactions in order to observe whether or not participants express certain intended emotional responses. The insight gleaned from such explorations can then be applied to future work in which the crafting of a particular experience is desired. This paper documents such an exploration, which took place in the form of an immersive, interactive environment. The environment, entitled "Fragile" included delicate movable lamps that rewarded the user with a combination of ambient sounds based on the lamps' positioning on a host object. [2]