Provoking Imagination and Emotion Through a Lively Mobile Phone: A User Experience Study

Grounded in cognitive semantics in cognitive science and the psychology of emotion, this paper first theoretically articulates the imaginative and affective user experiences of lively interactive artifacts. It then introduces an exemplar of lively interactive products, the mobile phone NEC FOMA N702iS with an intriguing water-level screen interface. Built upon the concept of a glass of water, the design of the phone can provoke users’ imagination and emotion regarding resource consumption and conservation, persuading one to take action. To collect empirical data as cross-references to the theoretical framework, user experience tests on an implementation of the interface have been conducted. The qualitative findings show how the interactions at different moments provoke participants via conceptual blends, desires, and appraisals. This demonstrates the application of the proposed framework for interpreting users’ meaning-making and emotion elicitation processes.