[MUSIC PLAYING]
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: We anthropomorphize anything
with a face with irregular movement,
with voice, with gestures.
And we do.
We have this emotional bond with technology,
even if it's not really technology.
SPEAKER 2: Robot.
I love you, robot.
[LAUGHTER]
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: Yeah, right?
So we can't help ourselves.
So Eric Pickersgill, you probably
saw this photography exhibit from a while back.
He took pictures of people and removed their cell phones
from their hands.
And that's why these guys look a little bit lost because they
lost part of their body.
And we channel our emotions through technology.
And we have all kinds of feelings about the internet
and our experiences with technology.
How about Instagram?
AUDIENCE: Fun.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: Fun.
AUDIENCE: Distracting.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: Distracting.
How about shame?
You know what I mean, like when you go, like, deep
back into somebody's profile.
You shouldn't be there.
And then you accidentally, like, you like something.
Terrifying.
Design for emotion-- we have a way of doing it.
But we're kind of bumping up against the limits of it
right now.
What's coming next?
I'll call it emotion 2.0.
But we're getting this confluence of machine learning
and affective computing, which is simply
put going to be able to get some kind of read on our emotions.
The classical theory of emotion says
that emotion starts in our bodies,
then immediately know what that emotion is instinctively.
And we have a universal expression on our face
or in our voice.
It turns out our brains are not so neat and tidy.
And emotion and cognition are mixed up together.
And so part of emotional intelligence
is going to be registering lots of different intensities, lots
of different kinds of emotions.
What I came out of this was is emotions
are really super complicated.
We just have to be aware of this that we're
making a lot of assumptions about what
is the right theory a emotion.
And so I'm going to talk about just a few ways
that I think we can broaden our perspective
on emotional design.
So this is an analysis of a photo after a terrorist attack
in France.
He's feeling mixed emotions.
And the expression is ambiguous.
And how we feel and interpret those emotions inside
is ambiguous and conflicted.
And we need to leave room for that and be OK with that.
I think we want to think about emotion as not just a place
that we want to take people to, but as something
in the background that we can know and have more empathy
and build that into our experiences
because there are going to be situations where we do
need that.
We talk a lot about humanizing technology.
Give them human characteristics almost
without understanding fully what those human characteristics
are.
I think we want to talk about giving humans agency first.
And a big way we do that is through emotional intelligence.
Finally, I think respecting human emotion
and not trivializing it is what came out as very important
to me out of all this work.
This was-- it's the Mind in the Eyes test developed by Simon
Baron-Cohen, Ali G's dad.
All the women's eyes were pretty heavily
made up and marked as flirtatious.
And then it was a bunch of really older men looking
thoughtful.
And they're all white.
And this is somebody who's very respected in the field.
We need to be really careful.
And we need to be really inclusive when we do this.
When we think about human intelligence,
it's not very intelligent without
this emotional component.
And so I really want to think about emotion
in a kind of more complex, nuanced, and graduated way
because I think this is where we're going from something
that's just simply a point in time
to kind of nurturing or developing
a relationship over time.
And so I think at this point because I
do this for every talk too, I want
you to raise your right hands and repeat after me.
I do solemnly swear.
AUDIENCE: I do solemnly swear.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: To everyone in this room.
AUDIENCE: To everyone in this room.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: To friendly robots everywhere.
AUDIENCE: To friendly robots everywhere.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: And to Pamela.
AUDIENCE: And to Pamela.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: That I will always.
AUDIENCE: That I will always.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: Always.
AUDIENCE: Always.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: Respect human emotion in design.
AUDIENCE: Respect human emotion in design.
PAMELA PAVLISCAK: And with the power vested in me as speaker,
I now declare you an amazing audience.
Thank you very much
[APPLAUSE]