How can social media become useful data source for designing for emotion?

Abstract

Emo:on-driven design inspects people’s emotional experiences in a targeted context and study the concerns behind these emo:ons. The is connected to an understanding to people’s personal experiences. Social media is playing an increasingly important role in daily life, as the technologies to do social media mining is developing, it is becoming a great database for learning about people. These data from social media is becoming a valuable dataset that is scaled, updated in every moment, and its access is being increasingly democratized.
These rich data are bringing a lot of opportunities for emo:on designers to scale up research and design. They form a dynamic dataset of people’s emo:ons related to their preferences, opinions, geographic locations, communities as well as social news and events. However, social media mining has not yet been employed for emo:on-driven design. Currently there are various tools and methodologies that support design conceptualization, but with no tools yet to employee the dynamic social media data as a material. This project investigate the role of the user- generated content on social media to emo:on- driven design, bridging the two with meaningful stories that reflect people’s subjective experiences in emotional events. Later on, experiments and tests were done to explore a workflow of how can designers discover the meaningful stories from Instagram. This resulted in a basic approach and a set of data exploration techniques. Therefore, the goal was set to developed a data exploration tool for designers, which facilitate them to do controllable explorations and flexible searches with with the qualitative, unstructured social media data. The target group is designers who are interested to look for meaningful stories in social media but have less experiences in data mining. In the end, a data exploration tool is developed , and it is evaluated by designers on the effectiveness aspect and experience aspect.
The evaluation indicated that the story exploration in social media with the tool could sensitize the designers with their target users’ daily life emotional experience, and can broaden the designer's horizon by having an overview on the possible experiences. The tool is recommended to be used in the very early phase of emo:on-driven design.