Theory of constructed emotion meets RE: An industrial case study

Emotional requirements should be treated as first-class citizens rather than subsumed under "non-functional" requirements. This follows already from three primary elements of persuasion by Aristotle, being logos, ethos and pathos, which respectively stand for function, quality and emotion. Eliciting and representing emotional requirements should be based on up-to-date emotion theories, which are backed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The most promising among them is the theory of constructed emotion. Accordingly, this paper aims to find out what are the advantages of grounding requirements engineering in the theory of constructed emotion. We also aim to explore the possible methods or techniques that support the construction of emotions in the requirements engineering process for building emotion aware systems and how they could be utilised by stakeholders of a sociotechnical system with different backgrounds. By utilising the action design research method, we first formulate an appropriate methodology and then apply it for building and evaluating an artefact, which in our case study consists of the animations shown on the Media Wall. The main contribution of our paper is an original repeatable methodology for eliciting and representing requirements for interdisciplinary design projects aimed at designing software-intensive emotive artefacts. The methodology is rooted in the theory of constructed emotion. Although the proposed methodology can in principle be used for designing and developing any sociotechnical systems, a particular variation of the methodology proposed in this paper is geared towards designing and developing emotive artefacts that have the purpose to co-construct certain emotions among the stakeholders and the audience with the goal to further particular societal issues.