The authors of this volume argue that design research needs more than mathematics: it needs many other vocabularies as well, including art, cultural studies, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and communication. This argument will not likely be news to readers of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, or to attendees at International Professional Communication Conferences, or to university teachers of technical communication, or to those who work in documentation and user support. But the book is of great interest in its treatment of the evolution of design research from the lab to the field to the showroom. It is particularly well-written, with excellent case studies, and it includes a chapter on building academic research programs that incorporate these ideas. It would be a profitable read for graduate students, faculty, designers of documentation and educational environments, and engineers who sometimes need a shake-up in their philosophy of designing for others.
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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