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).
The world is inherently meaningful for us, i.e. we perceive the world in terms of what we can do with it, and by physically interacting with it we access this meaning and express the meaning. We believe that this is the core reason and foundation for turning to movement-based interaction. 'Interaction creates meaning' does not only hold for users during interaction but also for designers when generating ideas and developing concepts. Therefore, we postulate that if one truly likes to design for movement-based interaction, one has to be or become an expert in movement, not just theoretically, by imagination or on paper, but by doing and experiencing while designing. In order to do so, we believe that designers need design tools, techniques, knowledge, awareness and skills that support their search for expressive, rich behaviour. Our search for this support resulted in several methods, tools and knowledge that help designers exploring, visualising and reflecting on interactions. Our developed methods and tools such as the Design Movement approach with its choreography of interaction, gestural design tools, interactive installations and interactive tangible sketching, have not only supported and inspired designers to design for movement-based interaction, but also resulted in surprising, fresh designs in comparison with the limited scope of rather uniform and traditional electronic consumer products. This paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of our approach.
This paper explores the concept of peripheral interactions; interactions with technology that take place in the background or periphery of the attention. We present two designs for a classroom setting. CawClock makes selected time frames audible in order to provide teachers with awareness of time. NoteLet is designed to support the teacher in observing children's behavior, by enabling him or her to take pictures of the classroom through straightforward interactions on a bracelet. A qualitative, two-week exploration of both systems in a classroom revealed that the soundscapes of CawClock indeed shifted to the periphery of the attention and supported the teacher's time awareness. The actions with NoteLet did not shift to the periphery. However, the tangible aspects of NoteLet seemed to facilitate the interaction to be quick and simple, which may indicate that it could shift to the periphery with more practice. Tangible interaction therefore seems a promising interaction style for this purpose.
The Virtual Window system uses iiead movements in a local office to control camera movement in a remote office. The result is like a window allowing exploration of remote scenes rather than a flat screen showing moving pictures. Our analysis of the system, experience implementing a prototype, and observations of people using it, combine to suggest that it may help overcome the limitations of typical media space configurations. In particular, it seems useful in offering an expanded field of view, reducing visual discontinuities, allowing mutual negotiation of orientation, providing depth information, and supporting camera awareness. The prototype we built is too large, noisy, slow and inaccurate for extended use, but it is valuable in opening a space of possibilities for the design of systems that allow richer access to remote colleagues.
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