Categorising emotional experiences with portable interactive devices

This paper reports on a six month longitudinal study exploring people’s emotional experience with two categories of portable interactive devices (PIDs); media and health related PIDs. The focus is on emotions and how PIDs mediate these experiences in everyday contexts. Previous findings presented by the authors (Gomez 2009, 2010) revealed that people’s emotional experiences with PIDs over time are influenced by whether interactions were at a personal or social level. This paper presents four categories of activities identified and their relationship to emotional experiences with PIDs that have been developed through further analysis of the data. It concludes with a discussion of the findings and their implications to the field of Design on the design of future PIDs.