Publish as TEI 2025 proceedings. Click to see the preprint paper.
A “warm” smile? A “cold” rage? Thermal and emotional experiences are often tightly connected. In recent years HCI has investigated opportunities for thermal technologies to enrich user experience. However, our vocabulary for these experiences has remained limited and inexpressive: “hot”, “cold”, “warm”, “cool”. This limits our ability to describe and conceptualise experience, and impedes the exploration of design features for thermal and affective interaction.
Our pictorial offers resources to enrich language and clarify the design space for thermal and affective technologies.
We expand the theoretical framework based on Chinese classical poetry to present six lenses on thermal and affective experience.
The pictorial also functions as a deck of design cards with a design exemplar. Together these resources can help researchers and designers conceptualise thermal experience, explore parameters for experiential design, and design technologies for rich thermal and affective experience.
These six lenses are represented in six design cards. Each card includes an explanation, inspirations for articulating experiential aspects, and related design principles. Each card is marked by a different colour, which we use to link the lenses across the pictorial.
Readers can read the cards in sequence or begin with any card relevant to their interests.
Where deeper engagement is desired on any lens, more detail is available in the Framework paper.