Ripple Thermostat: Affecting the Emotional Experience through Interactive Force Feedback and Shape Change

Force feedback and shape change are modalities with a growing application potential beyond the more traditional GUIs. We present two studies that explored the effect of these modalities on the emotional experience when interacting with an intelligent thermostat. The first study compared visual feedback, force feedback, and a combination of force feedback and shape change. Results indicate that force feedback correlates to experienced dominance during interaction, while shape change mainly affects experienced arousal. The second study explored how force feedback and shape change could communicate affective meaning during interaction with the thermostat through a co-design study. Participants designed the thermostat behavior for three scenarios supporting energy savings. Results suggest that despite their abstractness, force feedback and shape change convey affective meaning during the user-system dialogue. The findings contribute to the design of intelligible and intuitive feedback.