Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action

Abstract

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).

Game feature and expertise effects on experienced richness, control and engagement in game play

“…Players may choose from alternatives and investigate how game functions are interrelated, thereby promoting discovery (Manninen 2002;Björk et al 2003). Increasing the degrees of freedom in which a game can be manipulated is considered to increase richness at a behavioral level (Ullmer and Ishii 2000) affecting the physicality of interaction (Djajadiningrat et al 2004) and promoting challenge when these rich behaviors are involved in goal attainment (Malone 1981). Increasing the amount of media within the appearance of a game is considered to affect richness at a sensorial level (Sutcliffe 2002).…”

Resonant Bits

“…The Resonant Bits concept has been developed as a method for informing the design of new Tangible User Interfaces [9] in particular with the aim of moving 'from data centred to perceptual-motor centred' tangible interaction [3]. This move promotes the development of rich and tightly coupled interactions with tangibles that encourage the 'challenge and pride that comes with acquiring and possessing motor skills' [2].…”

Designing for movement experience

“…In Paul Dourish's book, Where the Action Is, he introduced the concept of embodied interaction to the field of HCI by arguing for an approach that takes into account the full spectrum of human skills [3]. This notion of Embodied Interaction has been utilized to understand the role of movement in supporting cognition, to investigate skillsbased approaches to movement, and to explore the semantic nature of movement interaction.…”