Over the past decade, our group has approached interaction design from an industrial design point of view. In doing so, we focus on a branch of design called formgiving 1 .Traditionally, formgiving has been concerned with such aspects of objects as form, colour, texture and material. In the context of interaction design, we have come to see formgiving as the way in which objects appeal to our senses and motor skills. In this paper we first describe our approach to interaction design of electronic products. We start with how we have been first inspired and then disappointed by the Gibsonian perception movement [1], how we have come to see both appearance and actions as carriers of meaning, and how we see usability and aesthetics as inextricably linked. We then show a number of interaction concepts for consumer electronics with both our initial thinking and what we learnt from them. Finally, we discuss the relevance of all this for tangible interaction. We argue that in addition to a data-centred view it is also possible to take a perceptual-motor centred view on tangible interaction. In this view it is the rich opportunities for differentiation in appearance and action possibilities that make physical objects open up new avenues to meaning and aesthetics in interaction design.Keywords tangible interaction, industrial design, ecological psychology, semantics 1 Approach Background and InfluencesNow that micro-controllers have found their way into almost every household product, be it cookers, washing machines, cameras or audio equipment, a domain which once was considered pure industrial design is faced with many interaction design challenges. For modern-day industrial designers, getting a grip on these interaction problems appears to have become an essential part of their profession. Yet the last two decades or so show that this integration of interaction design and industrial design is far from trivial. Many interfaces of electronic products feel 'stuck on' (Figure 1).This is not only a matter of form integration, but also a matter of how 'display and push button' interfaces disrupt interaction flow, causing many electronic products to feel computeresque [2][3]. One would expect that 'strong specific' devices tailored to a single task would feature alternative interfaces that are superior to the 'weak general' PC which needs to cater for many tasks [4][5], However, most electronic products actually feel very PC-like in interaction style-complete with decision trees and menu structures-only worse, because of their lack of Tom Djajadiningrat Faculty of Industrial Design, Designed Intelligence Group Eindhoven University of Technology Den Dolech 2, 5600MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands E-mail: j.p.djajadiningrat@tue.nl 1. Whilst formgiving is somewhat of a neologism in English, many other European languages do have a separate word for form-related design, including German (Gestaltung), Danish (formgivnin), Swedish (formgivning) and Dutch (vormgeving).

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The department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology distinct itself through a unique combination of focus (designing highly intelligent systems, products, and related services) and education model (competency-centred learning). Based on the foundations of our department we identify three implications for our preferred design process: it is flexible and open, it values design action as a generator of knowledge and it is driven by a vision on the design opportunities that are afforded by emerging intelligent technology. In this paper we explain the reflective transformative design process and the rationale behind.

The research on Tangible Interaction (TI) has been inspired by many different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI). Now that the field is getting more mature, in the sense that basic technologies and interaction paradigms have been explored, we observe a growing potential for a more design-oriented research approach. We suggest that there are several arguments for this proposed broadening of the TI-perspective: 1) the need for designing products within contexts-of-use that are much more challenging and diverse than the task-oriented desktop (or tabletop) systems that mostly inspire us today, 2) the interest to also design TI starting from existing physical activities instead of only as add-ons to digital applications, 3) the need for iterative design and evaluation of prototypes in order to develop applications that are grounded within daily practice over prolonged periods of time, and 4) the need to extend easeof-use to more hedonic aspects of interaction such as fun and engagement Author KeywordsDesign, tangible interaction, action research, design research, embodied interaction, product design.