Evaluating affector: co-interpreting what ‘works’

Affector is an interactive installation intended to stimulate reflection on and interpretation of emotions, based on an autobiographical design method in which the same people are designers, users, and evaluators. Evaluating Affector is challenging because we cannot evaluate the system by itself, but instead need to consider the role of users, designers and evaluators in actively appropriating and altering system meaning. Here, we describe the methods we are developing to evaluate Affector, which we hope to discuss and further develop with the other participants in the Evaluating Affective Interfaces workshop.