Emotions in climbing: a design opportunity for haptic communication

This paper presents the results of 11 interviews to beginner climbers aimed at investigating the role of emotions in learning climbing. Climbing is an extreme sport becoming increasingly popular thanks to a higher safety and to the spread of indoor gyms. Although the evolution of this sport from alpinism to indoor practice has made it accessible to all, the emotional involvement that it entails has remained. Our findings suggest that there can be a space for the design of technologies that help managing negative emotions by augmenting the communication between climbing partners with haptic feedback.