Finding Roles for Interactive Furniture in Homes with EmotoCouch

Furniture is the building block of the spaces we inhabit. Its design and its functions shape how we use spaces, as individuals and as groups. While being an integral part of our lives, furniture is unaware of what happens around it. But what if furniture could change its appearance? What situations should it respond to? How might it communicate its state to those around it? Can we use emotional expression for such communication? To find and explore roles for interactive furniture in domestic spaces, we built EmotoCouch: a provocative prototype that uses combinations of color, patterns, and haptics designed to convey emotions. We gathered feedback to the concept of an emotional couch from an online study with 138 participants and in a laboratory study with 14 parent-child pairs. Our findings identify promising future directions, use cases, and opportunities for the use of emotion for expressive communication by furniture.