Symposium: Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy, 21 March at the RSA

The project CEDE is about researching empathy in digital environments, and prototyping devices and services that are designed to facilitate empathy between people. We are organising a one day Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy symposium on Monday 21 March at the Royal Society for the Arts in London, where the project […]

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4Candles Prayer system upgrade at St Michael’s church in Hawkshead

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we replaced the hardware that was running the digital 4Candles prayer system in St Michael’s church in Hawkshead. One of the reasons for the system upgrade was to attempt to improve and/or deal with poor network connectivity that the system relies so heavily […]

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Praying in the digital age: Prayer installations in Hawkshead and Hackney

The digital prayer installations have been in use since July at St Michael’s church in Hawkshead, Cumbria, and at St Peter’s church in Hackney, London. These churches were chosen for the pilot project for their contrasting locations and different types of church communities: St Michael’s is in rural Lake District […]

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Promoting Empathy between Physically Seperated Communities through the Sharing of Prayers

In our previous work, we have highlighted that empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another; is an emotional capacity that has often been overlooked as a design goal in the creation of digital systems (Coulton et al. 2014). Empathy may be viewed as one of the […]

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From the ‘iPhone effect’ to the ‘virtual hug’: Is technology restricting or increasing our empathy?

Faced with a vast array of choice when it comes to interacting with those around us, our favoured communication medium will often be the simplest, quickest and most immediately available. But as technology continually develops, the impact of modern communication tools on the quality and depth of interpersonal exchange is […]

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From the ‘iPhone effect’ to the ‘virtual hug’: Is technology restricting or increasing our empathy?

Faced with a vast array of choice when it comes to interacting with those around us, our favoured communication medium will often be the simplest, quickest and most immediately available. But as technology continually develops, the impact of modern communication tools on the quality and depth of interpersonal exchange is […]

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Mood-controlled Light

Mood Lights from Panos Mavros on Vimeo. So, we wondered, what would be the effects of controlling the ambient lighting of a room using our own – or others’– mood state? What if my friends, family or coworkers could “see” how I am feeling in real-time? What if we could […]

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Defining empathy

Empathy is a complex psychological phenomenon; today there are as many researchers acknowledging discrepancies in the use of the term, as there are inconsistent definitions. Within both psychological science and lacklustre media articles, the word “empathy” has been generalised to allude to a whole host of related, but fundamentally separable, […]

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Defining empathy

Empathy is a complex psychological phenomenon; today there are as many researchers acknowledging discrepancies in the use of the term, as there are inconsistent definitions. Within both psychological science and lacklustre media articles, the word “empathy” has been generalised to allude to a whole host of related, but fundamentally separable, […]

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e-Health: Monitoring Physical Reactions

On the road towards constructing a Voight Kampff machine, the first stop has been the Cooking Hacks e-Health Arduino shield. This has proved a great success, and has provided us with simple and effective data collection from a number of biometric sensors. We have implemented the tool to report either […]

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Mediating Emotion

Everyday life is full of emotion. We react to situations, conversations, sudden events and elements of our environment in affective ways. As the Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio complellingly argued[1], emotions, such as pleasure and preference, are intrinsic aspects of making decisions, from the mundane to the extraordinary. Above all, however emotion […]

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Cybraphon, a robot with feelings

What would happen if we could make a machine that recognizes emotions? And further, what if we could make a machine that has ‘emotions’?How would ‘it’ communicate and to what effect? In 2009, the Edinburgh-based, art collective FOUND, created the Cybraphon, a musical automaton inspired by the play-pianos of the 19th […]

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The Voight-Kampff Machine…

In the dystopian science fiction movie Blade Runner a Voight-Kampff machine (VKM) was used to test and distinguish between humans and replicants based on the emphatic response to test questions. This fictional machine measures empathy based on biometrical reactions (e.g. eye movement, heart rate, blush response) to emotional questions. The […]

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