A design practice on communicating emotions through visual, tactile and auditory simulations

Emotional expression is an important human behaviour, which enriches communication. Sensory organs play crucial role in emotional perception. Today communication is mostly done via digital mediators, which dominantly address to vision excluding the other senses; therefore, communication becomes less affective. Wearable technology can appeal to sensory organs from very close distance due to its intimate interaction with human body. Hence, this technology can be used in order to make distant communication more affective by enabling multisensory interaction. This paper represents a user-centred design practice on wearable products that simulate sensorial feedbacks (tactile, visual and auditory) to express basic emotions. Three prototypes that transmit emotional messages were designed, built and tested to observe user behaviour. This paper discusses how user experience obtained through the user test can be taken further to design new communication products. © Springer India 2015.