How can negative emotions be staged within speculative design to expand the emotional vocabulary of interactive experience

Contemporary interaction design practice often privileges positive affect, seamlessness, and frictionless interaction, producing experiences that are efficient but emotionally narrow. This thesis investigates how negative emotions can be deliberately staged within speculative design to expand the emotional vocabulary of design experience. Drawing on Fokkinga and Desmet’s Rich Experience Framework, the research examines how emotions such as fear, frustration, anxiety, and unease can contribute to a meaningful experience when they are carefully framed rather than treated as usability failures. Using a research-through-design approach, the project developed storyboards, integrated journey map–empathy map systems, and animatics to explore how negative emotions might be structured within speculative interaction scenarios. The thesis argues that negative emotions become meaningful not through intensity alone, but through the orchestration of context, emotional progression, protective framing, and careful evaluation. These design artifacts do more than illustrate theory: they make the framework visually legible, propose conditions under which negative emotions may operate, and open critical discussion around how emotional design might move beyond technological functionality toward more humane forms of resonance. Ultimately, this thesis argues that incorporating negative emotions into design is not simply a matter of improving efficiency or productivity. Rather, it suggests that emotionally challenging interactions can invite temporality, social dynamics, and behavioral reconsideration in unconventional patterns. In this sense, the project contributes not only a speculative exploration of emotional design, but also an invitation for fellow designers to rethink what kinds of emotional interaction dynamics experiential design can make possible.