Master’s Research Project

BRIEF

‘Self-directed academic research project with supervisor. Complete freedom of project choice and direction, culminating in an academic style paper’

September 2020 - present

SKILLS

This project attempted to explore the emotive properties of abstract visualisations when being used to augment text-based communication. As it stands, text-based communication is rife with miscommunication and misinterpretation. This project aims to prove that the inclusion of evocative visuals within text-based messages could help over come this problem.

Emojis are currently the best way to communicate emotion in text, surely we can do better?

area

Despite it’s prevalence, we as humans are terrible at effectively communicating our emotions through text-based digital methods. We blame ourselves. We blame each other. However, perhaps the issue is not with the communicators, but with the communication medium; the written and spoken word.

Picture an emotional event in comparison with its descriptor. Isn’t a word such as “happiness” or “anger” completely inadequate?

One form of communication particularly apt at conveying affective meaning is visualisations. Research in the field of psychology, marketing, product design, human computer interaction and the visual arts has strongly proved this link. However very few available methods seek to incorporate this within our messages.

research

The first novel proposal of this research is to develop a dynamic model that maps from the emotional space to the visual space. This visualisation model is constructed on Unity and is integrated into a simple text-based communication platform. Affective responses are gathered from the participants using objective physiological data (which is analysed through a neural network) and subjective, psychological report.

One aim of the research is to try and elicit similar responses between the sender and receiver of a message - indicating true emotional transfer.