Bloody Robots as Emotional Design: How Emotional Structures May Change Expectations of Technology Use in Hospitals

Thomas Markussen

By applying Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner’s theory of conceptual blending to a design case, this paper demonstrates how experiencing emotional qualities in technology design may influence the way users cognitively reconstruct standard expectations of use. In so doing, the paper expands the dominating appraisal theory of emotion in design in three central respects: (i) the understanding of mixed emotions is deepened; (ii) a more detailed explanation is given of the specific operations involved in appraisal processes grounded in embodied interaction; and (iii) a structural model is proposed for mapping the constitutive role that mixed emotions play in product usage and interaction.