Dissertation Defense - Annuska Zolyomi
You are cordially invited to join us for the dissertation defense of Annuska Zolyomi, to be held on Thursday, June 3, 2021, via Zoom from 2:30-4 p.m. PDT.
Grounded Design of Affective Computing Accounting for Social-Emotional-Sensory Experiences of Neurodivergent Adults
Abstract:
We use digital communication technologies to augment or even completely replace face-to-face interactions in our work and daily lives. Technologies such as video calling and texting provide avenues for people to express themselves in implicit and explicit ways, such as facial expressions and emojis, respectively. As digital technologies increasingly mediate emotional cues, being emotionally aware requires detecting, transmitting, and receiving such cues. People’s emotions and affective responses play a significant role in establishing mutual understanding—or misunderstanding—of each other’s intended meaning.
This dissertation examines how to improve the use of affective computing to support face-to-face interpersonal communication between neurodiverse dyads—an autistic young adult and a non-autistic conversation partner. Autism is a neurological developmental condition that impacts one’s expression of emotions, communication, and desired way to establish social bonds. According to the Center for Disease Control, around 1 in 54 children in the United States have been diagnosed with autism. My research engages autistic young adults to identify problems with communication technologies that they encounter during early adulthood—a time period in which they are taking more ownership of their technology decisions and adopting technological practices of adulthood. Autistic young adults must navigate a world in which the vast majority of people they communicate with daily are neurotypical. Neurodiverse dyads co-construct their emotional and social experiences while communicating across boundaries formed by neurological differences. However, current computer-mediated communication and affective technologies do not adequately address neurodivergent individuals, as evidenced by the lack of scaffolding for conversations and emotional exchanges. This technology gap is particularly detrimental for autistic individuals since miscommunication and social tensions contribute to social isolation, reduced agency, and, more broadly, limited education and employment opportunities.
By focusing on experiences of neurodivergent communicators—those who are autistic—this dissertation identifies technological design strategies that make affective computing more inclusive of diverse perspectives. Through Grounded Design research comprising contextual inquiry, participatory design, and technology appropriation, this dissertation engages autistic research participants as co-designers in envisioning affective computing. This work contributes a theoretical framing of the tightly interwoven social, emotional, and sensory experiences of autistic adults. These dimensions serve as the foundation for a social-emotional-sensory design map that highlights that embodied and co-constructed nature of the emotional experiences of autistic adults within the context of physical environments, social relationships, and technology use. The design map serves as a conceptual tool for designers and researchers in pointing towards rich design sites for novel affective computing for neurodiverse communities. Through remote design, a speculative design concept emerged: an emotion translator. This design concept explored alternative ways to augment a conversation with rich visual imagery to convey emotional states. By appropriating a low-fidelity prototype, neurodiverse dyads preserved, re-configured, and critiqued the emotion translator concept. This dissertation contributes empirically-based research insights, a theoretical framework, and design artifacts that expand scholarly knowledge of how neurodivergent young adults experience social interactions, thus, opening up design horizons for more inclusive affective computing and participatory design.
Zoom link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/94104831130
Committee:
- Jaime Snyder, Chair
- David Hendry, Member
- Julie Kientz, Member
- Ilene Schwartz, GSR