Crafting Affective Micro-Interactions: From Mindful Design Explorations to Digital Health Interventions

The dissertation explores how affective interaction design centered around somabased methods and mindfulness practices can inform the development of digital technologies that support emotional health, with an evolving focus on chronic disease management. Departing from an initial inquiry about how everyday smartphone interactions might be designed to foster mindfulness, it gradually develops towards investigating how affective interactions at a micro-level can be meaningfully integrated into a disease-management application for people living with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) in ways that support emotional well-being and coping.
Situated within Human–Computer Interaction and design research, this dissertation addresses a persistent blind spot in digital health technologies within RA care: While self-tracking systems tend to produce much data about symptoms such as pain, stiffness, and mood, they largely reproduce the same biomedical, emotionally detached perspective that also dominates healthcare practice. For people living with RA this can imply the feeling of the body becoming centered through data whereas the emotional and mental experience of living in that body remains unseen, both in clinical care and in digital tools meant to support everyday life with chronic disease.
This thesis evolves towards approaching this gap as a design space, exploring how digital technologies can attend to illness as an embodied and emotionally charged experience with affective and somatically grounded interaction design principles.
In the course of four research articles, out of which two were developed as part of the core PhD project and two emerged from exploratory design research that preceded and inspired it, the dissertation builds a research trajectory from speculative and reflective inquiry to applied intervention in a real-world digital health setting. The early studies investigate breathing and mindful interaction as affective design materials, contributing conceptual and methodological approaches for working with affect and bodily experience in interaction design. These explorations function as methodological laboratories, creating design sensibilities that later shape the applied work in a chronic disease context. In these later studies, RA is explored through an affect-centered design approach, resulting in a mindfulness-based, justin-time micro-intervention that functions as a probe into how everyday tracking interactions open spaces for emotional support. Rather than framing the intervention in terms of clinical outcomes, the work looks at how these affectively framed interactions are encountered in an everyday use setting.
All in all, the dissertation contributes to design research and HCI with insights that are both conceptual and applied, illuminating how affective interaction design can engage with and shape digital health tools. It articulates how such a design lens can lead to more emotionally attuned and supportive experiences with technology, while also highlighting how just-in-time content is negotiated subjectively and in the messy realities of everyday life and how its outcomes are not stable or evenly distributed, yet can emerge as deeply meaningful moments of support for some.