Co-designing the Affective City: Speculative Explorations of Affective Place-Based Experiences

The built environment has the capacity to generate affective responses and entice emotions. Spaces can be lively and cheerful, fearful or boring, and these emotions can be triggered by design elements, or by previous experience and memory. However, urban design and smart city approaches have often minimized the role of emotions in the built environment. In this workshop, we actively engage participants in co-mapping, ideating and speculating potential affective interactions in future cities. We curate a typology of urban spaces and emotional states, as well as a toolkit of strategies from urban design and HCI research and practice. We invite participants to contribute their own selection of places and emotional states, iterate on tools, and conceptualize speculations for the affective city. Our workshop will result in a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between people, places, technology and affect.