Technologies increasingly shape our social and emotional lives. One growing concern is that technologies for social media, education and even companionship and counselling too often undermine rather than foster social bonds. To address this, we need clear, practical, evidence-based design principles for technologies that are both socially and emotionally sensitive. Yet the design of affective technologies currently focuses almost exclusively on individual experience, leaving design principles with little grip on social and relational contexts.
I am developing principles for a fundamentally relational approach to the design of affective technologies. I am investigating how affective technologies can amplify and enable interpersonal connection, rather than undermine it or, at best, compensate for its absence.
I am particularly proud of my recent works on affective thermal interaction, which connects perceptual science to aesthetic and humanistic accounts of experience. Over the years, generations of HCI researchers have returned to the question of how we should connect controlled scientific findings to the complexities of real-world interactions. In my recent work, I address this via a scientifically informed analysis of literary accounts of thermal-affective experience, following similar approaches in sensory psychology. These literary accounts provide eloquent and evocative descriptions of situated experience, situated in everyday life and activities - something otherwise difficult to capture. Analysing them allows me to suggest principles and guidelines for the design of thermalaffective experiences, and specify future empirical research in the field (The design framework paper). This work has opened a rich seam of research ideas for me which I am now addressing. This includes design research to understand the possibilities of thermal-haptic interfaces for affective regulation, and the development of a toolkit for prototyping which bridges experiential and engineering aspects of thermal-haptic experience (Thermal cards).
In the future, I would like to be known as a researcher who is leading the translational science in the field of affective interaction in HCI: my work creates bridges between experiential, scientific, and design approaches to support the development of multisensory technologies. My research toolkits will help engineering-focused researchers address the complexity of affective and situated experience, and help design-focused researchers connect their understandings to scientific and engineering principles. In particular, I plan to pursue this goal in the context of multisensory technologies for affective interaction and affective regulation in children and both neurodiverse and neurotypical populations.
Before my PhD, I studied Industrial design in the school of Mechenical Engineering (ME), Shandong University (SDU, Double-First Class University, Rank A）in China, with 1st class honours; and Interaction Design in the design school at Human University (HNU), one of the leading design schools in China.
Along side that, I have ten years of fine art training, including apprenticeships in several art studios, specialising in Gong-Bi (one of the traditional Chinese painting techniques), Calligraphy, and Western art.
I also enjoy metal working. I completed a three-month metalworking internship, where I gained hands-on experience in the full industrial production cycle - from material forging to CNC machine operation.
As a designer, I designed the branding and visual identity system (VI system) for the China Academy Museum.