Guidelines to develop emotional awareness devices from a cultural-Perspective: A latin american example

Abstract

Interpersonal communication involves more than just words; it involves emotional issues that can be roughly seen as complex organized internal states. Awareness of those states allows human beings to evaluate social information and develop strategic social intelligence. In this setting, developing emotional awareness devices can be successfully achieved under a Cultural Centred Design perspective, as social and cultural features are crucial to ensure an adequate level of emotional awareness. However, cultural-oriented recommendations are not always included to lead the promoting of an adequate emotional awareness in digital and physical devices. To cope with this problem, this paper presents a minimal set of cultural guidelines that should be taken into account to develop emotional awareness devices under Cultural Centred Design. To illustrate the proposal, the development of an extended virtual portrait is discussed by highlighting a cultural viewpoint form a Latin-American perspective. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.