John Can Gurkan
How might we enhance emotional expression in digital communication while keeping the benefits digital offers?
Design research project that investigates the tangled relationship between digital communication and physical expression. While digital has broken down physical and contextual boundaries between people, it has also created a new divisor: the absence of non-verbal cues, nuances, and embodied emotions. GimDiCom provides guidance for designers and developers to re-imagine digital interactions in ways that foster emotional authenticity and strengthen human connection.
GimDiCom is a design research framework that equips designers and developers with tools to reintroduce nuance into digital communication. Through guidance documents and physical prototyping objects, it helps envision digital systems that support richer, more emotionally authentic interactions.
The exponential rise of digital communication has transformed societies, enabling conversations across cultures and continents. Yet transformation has brought challenges: without access to physical expressions, misunderstanding, confusion, or oversimplified emotions occur in digital conversations. Research highlights how much of our emotional intelligence relies on subtleties like posture, facial expression, tone, or rhythm. Current systems struggle to account for these nuances, leading to a gap in emotive depth. GimDiCom addresses this challenge by offering a framework for enhancing emotional expression in digital contexts.
This project is grounded in a combination of academic research, reflective writing, and social conversations. A podcast series captured the perspectives of different individuals on how digital channels affect their ability to express and interpret emotions. Open-source dissemination of insights and design methods ensures accessibility for creators, researchers, and innovators globally, encouraging inclusive development.
GimDiCom provides structured guidance for each stage of the user’s communication journey. Stage guidances combine context, design suggestions, and performative activities, supporting designers and developers without limiting their creative agency. Bridging the gap between digital and physical, GimDiCom introduces four abstract, analog objects named “Forms of Physicality.” These objects are used in performative workshops, enabling participants to prototype emotional interactions through physical engagement. The objects’ abstract shapes intentionally avoid connotations, allowing for open interpretation. By interacting physically with the objects, participants reflect on nuances such as anticipation, observation, and response. These activities help uncover opportunities for digital systems to better capture and translate emotional cues.
As digital technologies advance, human–computer interactions must move beyond purely functional interfaces toward more intuitive and emotionally aware systems. GimDiCom advocates for inclusive digital development that embraces cultural diversity and safeguards our ability to express emotions fully. By equipping designers with methodological guidance and tools for physical prototyping, the project promotes communication systems that enhance, rather than diminish, our emotional capabilities.
GimDiCom proposes a set of guidance documents and physical touchpoints for each stage of digital communication, to be used by designers and developers of digital platforms, during relevant phases of their design and development process, to enable richer emotional expression and foster stronger digital relationships. The outcome includes Stage Guidance documents, Forms of Physicality prototypes, user testing scenarios, and a series of case study films. All resources are made accessible online.
Period
2023 September - 2024 January​
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Expertise
Design research, systems thinking, speculative prototyping, user journey mapping, social innovation, open-source dissemination.
Brief
How might we reintroduce physical nuance into digital communication, ensuring emotional expression is preserved while retaining the accessibility and reach of digital technologies?
Challenge
Guidance and methods that designers can integrate into their practices, while addressing the cultural, social, and technological implications of emotional communication in digital contexts.
Outcome
A framework of Stage Guidances and Forms of Physicality, publicly accessible for further exploration and adaptation by the wider design and research community.