Physical gestures for abstract concepts: Inclusive design with primary metaphors

Abstract

a b s t r a c tDesigners in inclusive design are challenged to create interactive products that cater for a wide range of prior experiences and cognitive abilities of their users. But suitable design guidance for this task is rare. This paper proposes the theory of primary metaphor and explores its validity as a source of design guidance. Primary metaphor theory describes how basic mental representations of physical sensorimotor experiences are extended to understand abstract domains. As primary metaphors are subconscious mental representations that are highly automated, they should be robustly available to people with differing levels of cognitive ability. Their proposed universality should make them accessible to people with differing levels of prior experience with technology. These predictions were tested for 12 primary metaphors that predict relations between spatial gestures and abstract interactive content. In an empirical study, 65 participants from two age groups (young and old) were asked to produce two-dimensional touch and three-dimensional free-form gestures in response to given abstract keywords and spatial dimensions of movements. The results show that across age groups in 92% of all cases users choose gestures that confirmed the predictions of the theory. Although the two age groups differed in their cognitive abilities and prior experience with technology, overall they did not differ in the amount of metaphor-congruent gestures they made. As predicted, only small or zero correlations of metaphor-congruent gestures with prior experience or cognitive ability could be found. The results provide a promising step toward inclusive design guidelines for gesture interaction with abstract content on mobile multitouch devices.

Advances in the development of a cognitive user interface

“…While previous research seems to support this hypothesis (e.g. Hurtienne et al [16]), surveys on concept formation suggest that some image schemas occur earlier in infancy compared to other image schemas. Mandler and Pagán Cánovas [17] considered path schemas such as up-down, container, location, blockage, into, out of, open as basic image schemas occurring early in infancy at preverbal stages.…”

Tele-proximity: Tele-community of Inquiry Model. Facial Cues for Social, Cognitive, and Teacher Presence in Distance Education

“…Moveable cameras which free the user from having to sit in front of a computer, face and eye movement tracking devices (Yang, Wu, Hsiao, Tsai, & Hung 2008), hand gesture recognition (Hurtienne et al, 2010), or 3D holographic representations of participants called TeleHumans (Blanche et al, 2010) deserve more research to determine how they can best be implemented .…”

Mixing languages'

“…The design process was carried out using image schema methodology [5] to describe the mental models of electricity in rural African and to design the interaction accordingly. This approach was chosen because a growing body of research demonstrates the usefulness of image schemas as design guidance for abstract concepts: for attributes like emotions, importance or power [3,10], for musical sound [2], for social justice [1] or for the operation and programming of heating systems [6]. Empirical data shows that the instantiation of image schemas in user interfaces increases users' effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in objective and subjective measurements [6,4].…”

“…In the field of HCI, image-schematic metaphors for user interface design can be derived from an analysis of linguistic text corpora (e.g., [3]) and natural language in user interviews [6]. For example, "he spoke weightily" is an instantiation of the image-schematic metaphor IMPORTANT IS HEAVY and implies that he spoke about important things.…”