Intimate and Emotional Interface

Since communication and computing technology is progressive at accelerated pace, humans hardly to get with it. Hence, people desire an appearance good to use and an intimate connection in relationship between humans and objects. By extension of “control intimacy”

from electronic musical instruments analysis (Moore, 1988), Fels suggests that the ‘intimacy’

is “a measure of subjective match between the behavior of an object and the control of that object.” Here, the object could be a person, a device, or some entity. Moreover, High Intimacy indicates that an object seems to be an extension of the person, satisfaction is derived from interacting with the object, and emotional expression spontaneously flows (Fels et al., 2004).

Human Communication Technology Research Laboratory (HCT lab) is absorbed in new human computer interaction technology and theories of embodiment and intimacy between humans and computers. The research group are trying to combine emerging technology, multimodal (Oviatt, 2002), and multimedia systems, with the enlargements of psychology, sociology and art, to enhance the communication abilities between people, or between people and machines. In the opinion of HCT lab, intimacy is an essential factor for the interface design. In addition, the research group also indicated that the contributing factors of intimacy

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could be consistency, responsiveness, usefulness, learning ability, functionality, and so on (Fels et al., 2004).

Horton and Wohl (1956) have described the bond of intimacy in the personality programs.

They’ve found that an illusion of intimacy could be created through the duplication of the gestures, conversational style, and milieu of an informal face-to-face gathering. In some of TV shows or radio programs, hosts/hostesses usually give impressions that they are responding to and sustaining the contributions to the invisible interlocutors, and an interaction, a dialogue would be created between them and the audience. Horton has called this as “an illusion of intimacy,” since the relationship is actually inevitably one-side and the reciprocity between the two might be suggested. In this case, the technical devices of the media themselves have been exploited to create illusions of intimacy between the hosts/hostesses and the audience.

Intimacy has been mediated through symbols of attention such as flowers, missives and love letters for ages. Today, emerging technologies, like mobile phone and the Internet, is regularly manipulated to help people maintain the intimate relationships with family members or friends living far away. Kaye and Goulding (2004) used the notion of critical technical practice to provide a theoretical construct to understand if there is a problem for couples who try to maintain a feeling of intimacy but live far away from each other. The work of Kaye and Goulding fits the three typical characteristics of Gaver about awareness technologies. They used soft silicone as evocative materials for hand holding, exploited non-didactic metaphors and had unique physicality of an egg’s shape and texture.

Vetere et al. (2005) put their attention on phenomena that are recognizably intimate, as expressions of tenderness, acts of devotion and habit of demonstrable affection. They argued the inadequacy of current technologies which support the social and personal needs in connection. They used cultural probes and technology provocation to comprehend the contextual of people’s intimate lives, and gave several innovation design concepts for communication of emotion to maintain intimacy at a distance.

Similarly Ogawa et al. (2005) also focused on the scenario where two intimate persons live

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in distant places, and developed Small Connection communication media to convey faint information such as light, wind and touch through the use of a robot technology (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Left: “Air” communicates a feeling of presence to a distant partner through the light. A pair of lamps would be kept by the close friends or family members at different places. Since one of the lamps is turned on by touch, the other one would light up, too.

Right: “Passage” is a close proximity media space to create a connection between people in different cities or cultures. http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefan/hc/projects/passages/

Their viewpoint is how to propose media for communication between two persons and let them have a feeling of each other’s presence through a simple communication installation with tangible signs and intimate interfaces. Including the concepts of ambient media, tangible interfaces, intimate technology and robot technology, their work broke down the common communication media forms of vision and hearing and extended the possibility of communication media to convey casual feelings, moods, presence, and atmosphere.

Another special case of intimate design project is Passage of Human Connectedness group (Bitton et al., 2006). It is a very particular design for media space, integrating multiple types of sensual media to connect distant places and groups of people. The significance of this installation is its intention which not only provides an intimate entry of different cities, communities, and cultures, but creates unusual relationships with strangers in different locations. Not like a departed media space design, this research team developed an engaging visual system to allow passers-by to approach extremely close to the interactive screen surface.

Since a passer-by walks through the installation, the silhouette of his/ her body would be reflected on the screen. When this local participant moves in front of this media installation, the viewer could see more of the scene of the remote counterparts. Meanwhile, a silhouette of the passer-by could become an engaging and intimate interface to touch and interact with a

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stranger far away (Figure 4).