iAWN: An ambient affective medium for meditative use and emotional awareness in home

In this paper we have developed an ambient affective medium called iAWN for meditative use and emotional awareness, with an emphasis on aesthetics at home. The iAWN device is a straw-like tangible interface that uses emotional metaphors to convey meaningful interactions and to evoke aesthetic experiences in everyday life. By coupling emotion and action in an augmented plant interface, human emotions can be mediated by a physical metaphor and simplicity while manipulating the iAWN. The work is based on a cultural probe method by collecting primary visual data about domestic settings. We took a design probe approach to explore design alternatives. The current version of the iAWN prototype is equipped with sensors, which connects Cloud Databases with Google Calendar services. Through a participatory ideation process, users provided feedback to develop our tangible interface and enrich the characters of the iAWN prototype used in interactive smart homes.