Building Emotional Artifacts in Social Worlds: Challenges and Perspectives

Contents

This paper discusses ideas relative to the construction of emotional artifacts that have to interact in a social world, and in particular with humans. It first examines some of the ways in which emotions can enhance social interactions with artifacts, and some of the challenges posed to the designer. After considering the debate that opposes "shallow" versus "deep" modeling, it sketches some ways in which we can anchor emotions in the architecture of artifacts in order to make emotional interactions meaningful not only to the human, but also to the artifact itself. It finally outlines some of the cognitive capabilities that artifacts should incorporate for their emotions to be properly grounded and to give rise to rich social exchanges with humans.