Exploring emotion, affect and technology in the urban environment

With the vision of ubiquitous computing becoming increasingly realized through smart city solutions, the rise of the quantified-self movement and the proliferation of smartphones and smart watches, a new technological layer is being added to the urban environment. This technological layer offers the possibility to augment our experience of the city, but to that end, there is a growing need to better understand person-place relationships. Urban HCI studies are increasingly focusing on emotion and affect to create a better understanding of people's experience of the urban environment, and to investigate how technology can play a role in augmenting this urban lived experience. This paper outlines a thesis that seeks to understand how people's experiences of places in the urban environment that are meaningful to them on a personal level, and in particular their stories and emotions connected to those places, could potentially inform the design of future technological devices and services. It investigates the different forms this data could take and the potential for sharing this personal data with others.