An Emotion Translator: Speculative Design By Neurodiverse Dyads

For autistic individuals, navigating social and emotional interactions can be complex, often involving disproportionately high cognitive labor in contrast to neurotypical conversation partners. Through a novel approach to speculative co-design, autistic adults explored affective imaginaries — imagined futuristic technology interventions — to probe a provocative question: What if technology could translate emotions like it can translate spoken language? The resulting speculative prototype for an image-enabled emotion translator chat application included: (1) a visual system for representing personalized emotion taxonomies, and (2) a Wizard of Oz implementation of these taxonomies in a low-fidelity chat application. Although wary of technology that purports to understand emotions, autistic participants saw value in being able to deploy visual emotion taxonomies during chats with neurotypical conversation partners. This work shows that affective technology should enable users to: (1) curate encodings of emotions used in system artifacts, (2) enhance interactive emotional understanding, and (3) have agency over how and when to use emotion features.