Zhou, Devleminck & Geurts, DIS 2024 · Survey / literature review · Read 2026-08-01
1. What they did
A systematic review of 50 papers at the intersection of tangible interaction and human affect, emotion and mood. Searched ACM DL and IEEE Xplore, organised around five questions: what affective purposes TUIs serve, how the systems are designed, how they are evaluated, what design guidance exists, and where the gaps are.
2. Method
Systematic literature review, standard PRISMA procedure: define questions → search → screen → code → extract themes → summarise guidelines and challenges.
3. Findings and contribution
- Eight affective purposes: communication, regulation, recognition, education, affective impact of tangible interaction, elicitation, embodiment, assessment.
- Interaction is extremely concentrated: 41 of 49 studies rely on hand-based manipulation. Full-body appears in 4. Breath in 1.
- Output is mostly visual (25/49) and haptic (19/49); shape-changing in 2.
- Three logics connect input/output to affect: common sense vs. validated knowledge, unconscious vs. conscious, ambiguous vs. clear.
- Four design dimensions: User Engagement, Theoretical Grounding, Interaction, Affect.
- Three challenges: bringing real-world affective experience into user studies (lab → in the wild); using embodied interaction to influence affective states rather than merely detect them; the absence of any shared standard for evaluating tangible affective interfaces.
4. What it gives me
- A map of the territory. Any new paper in this area can be located against this classification first.
- Gap confirmed: full-body embodied interaction combined with gameful affective interaction is close to empty — hand-based is 83%, full-body is 4 papers, and the gameplay category contains no discussion of gameful design at all. This is where the thesis can stand.
- A Related Work structure worth stealing: organise by affective purpose rather than by technology. It suits my narrative better — what affective purpose is my installation for?
- **Challenge 2 is my contribution sentence** — “Zhou et al. (2024) identified the lack of understanding of how embodied interaction influences affective states as a key challenge; this thesis addresses that gap by…” That sentence can go straight into the Introduction.
- Challenge 3 is a freedom, not a problem. With no agreed evaluation standard, I can define my own dimensions rather than borrow an existing scale.
- Somaesthetic design is flagged as a theoretical resource for embodied interaction — worth following up.
5. Questions it left me
- The review searched only ACM DL and IEEE Xplore, excluding industrial design, psychology and medicine. With those included, is my gap smaller? Then again, it does establish that nobody inside HCI has done it.
- Systems requiring no active user input were excluded — so where do ambient, passively-sensing affective systems sit in this framework?
- The TUI/robot boundary is admitted to be blurry. Is my installation a TUI or an interactive installation? If the audience faces only a screen with no physical object, is it tangible at all?
- Cultural difference in embodied metaphor — feeling blue, hot-headed. What happens if the interaction is designed from Chinese or East Asian bodily metaphors instead? This might be a distinctive contribution.
- Their “gameplay” category is about using tangible interaction to elicit emotion in games, not about gameful design as a design method. I need a separate source for that.