Thermal Cards: From Classical Chinese Poetry to Designerly Lenses on Thermal-Affective Technology

A "warm" smile? A "cold" rage? Thermal and emotional experiences are often tightly connected. In recent years HCI has investigated opportunities for thermal technologies to enrich user experience. However, our vocabulary for these experiences has remained limited and inexpressive: "hot", "cold", "warm", "cool". This limits our ability to describe and conceptualise experience, and impedes the exploration of design features for thermal and affective interaction. Our pictorial offers resources to enrich language and clarify the design space for thermal and affective technologies. We expand a recently developed theoretical framework based on Chinese classical poetry to present six lenses on thermal and affective experience. The pictorial also functions as a deck of design cards with a design exemplar. Together these resources can help researchers and designers conceptualise thermal experience, explore parameters for experiential design, and design technologies for rich thermal and affective experience.