This project looks into the intimate relationships that people build with interactive products that surround them. In the field of interaction design but also marketing, this is often referred to as product attachment. Existing work has dominantly looked into ways to influence product attachment positively. However, building upon the idea of social robots –a branch of interactive products that display human qualities – I am exploring what it means to deliberately influence product attachment negatively through shock. This aims to shed a different light on product attachment, to show how interaction designers can firstly better understand it and secondly better design for it.
Shocking interactions is not an established term in the interaction design community. I am framing the term in existing literature about surprising, disruptive, and unexpected interactions. I am showing how shocking interactions in combination with product attachment relates to the work on social robots.
I am asking: Can human relations with products be better understood through shocking interactions and if so, how to design these shocking interactions?
This project is inspired by the Showroom approach to constructive design research. The prototypes that I have developed are the artefacts meant to provoke a focused discussion, other than artefacts that mean to improve a situation.
I decided to work with interactive pillows, as pillows show to be appropriate products to quickly establish a certain attachment to. Based upon a review of existing interactive pillows and five designed and deployed pillow probes, I designed an interactive pillow to investigate the relation between shocking interactions and product attachment. This interactive pillow enriches the falling asleep process, and becomes shocking by artificially screaming in the middle of the night. As a more detailed research question I am investigating how shocking interactions differ when on the one hand people are interacting with the interactive pillow itself, and on the other hand when people are connected with each other through the interactive pillow. The methods that I used for data gathering have been a combination of interviews, questionnaires, self-reporting, and Wizard of Oz.
All in all, this project argues that interaction designers can learn a lot about product attachment by not only designing for positive experiences, but also by deliberately designing for negative experiences.
