Embodied Emotion: designing interactive products for a person’s emotional being-in-the-world

In this paper we present a new perspective on how one can design interactive products in a way that they will become a meaningful and mediating part in a person’s emotional being-in- the-world. In an ongoing participatory design project, a concept of an assistive and interactive wearable is currently designed with the aim to empower people with an autism spectrum disorder by supporting them in their process of emotion regulation. We reflect on this case study by contrasting embodiment theory with our design insights, offering a new perspective of what it means to design embodied interactive products for emotion regulation. This can be used by designers, offering them an embodied perspective as a guidance when making decisions during the design process. We speculate that our embodied perspective on emotion regulation enables the design of products that integrate better into a person’s lifeworld and are therefore less likely to be abandoned.