Cj Kees Overbeeke

Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action

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”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).. 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.

Move to get moved: a search for methods, tools and knowledge to design for expressive and rich movement-based interaction

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.

Aesthetic Interaction: A Framework

The rise in the development of interactive electronic products has been accompanied by growing interest in the aesthetic aspects not only of the artifacts themselves but in the aesthetics of interactive systems. Petersen, Iversen, Krogh, and Ludvigsen5 point out that these two approaches to the aesthetics of design reflect Shusterman’s6 distinction between analytical aesthetics and pragmatic aesthetics, respectively. From an analytic perspective, aesthetics arise as a product property, as “added value” to an artifact. The focus of the design process here is on the aesthetics of appearance, on the creation of artifacts that are attractive and pleasurable. The pragmatic approach, on the other hand, is concerned with the aesthetics of use. According to this view, the aesthetics of an artifact emerge out of a dynamic interaction between a user and this artifact and is an integral part of what has been labeled an aesthetic interaction by some researchers7 in design and as a resonant interaction by others.8 At the same time the scope of design is changing from human/artifact interaction, mainly focused on opening up the functionality of a product, toward a broader approach that seeks to enhance interpersonal and societal values, including personal, aesthetic, and socio-cultural ones, through the application of intelligence (i.e., smart electronics) in artifacts. Much has been written concerning the factors that contribute to the aesthetics of human-artifact interaction. However, to our knowledge, no framework or conceptual model of the structure of the interactive aesthetic experience that incorporates these factors has appeared in the literature. In this paper we integrate an information-processing model of the nature of an aesthetic experience with visual art proposed by Locher and his colleagues9, 10 with a framework proposed by Wensveen11 that describes the coupling of a user’s actions (i.e., handling an artifact) and a product’s function; the result is the formation of a general theoretical framework for understanding the nature of a user’s aesthetic interaction with design products. Our hope is that the proposed conceptual framework will serve as a valuable basis for the development of experimental studies into the nature of aesthetic interaction to complement the experimental tradition of usability studies among designers. Before presenting the framework, it is important to note, as have Petersen and her colleagues,12 that the notion of aesthetic is used in ambiguous ways by theoreticians when it comes to answering the key question: What is the nature of the resulting

Embodying complexity through movement sonification: case study on empowering the speed-skater

In this paper, we describe the Augmented Speed-skate Experience (ASE), a case of movement sonification in professional speed-skating. We designed and developed a system that provides feedback on technique to a professional speed-skater through an extra sense-modality, i.e. sound. Complexity is incorporated directly by the athlete and not through an external system that would feedback representational judgments of improving speed-skating technique. This research-through-design case explores the conditions for mapping information directly to the body. This is done by an evaluation on several sets of continuous parameter mappings in a field-lab setup. Results from this qualitative evaluations show that the movement sonification mappings cause inter-modal convergence, resulting in actual improvement. We designed a movement sonification mapping of speed-skating technique that is informative, motivating, non-coercive, robust and easy to apply. Feedback designed according to existing natural acoustic conventions inherently coupled to the speed-skaters actions, allows for complex information to be assessed and embodied by the athlete thus improving his skating technique.

Exploring peripheral interaction design for primary school teachers

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 childrens 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 teachers 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.

Designing for perceptual crossing to improve user involvement

In this paper we describe our research on how to design for perceptive activity in artifacts in order for perceptual crossing between subject and artifact to happen. We base our research on the phenomenology of perception [19] and on ecological psychology [10]. Perceptual crossing is believed to be essential to share perception and thereby to feel involved in the situation [5,15]. We propose a theoretical model in which perceptive connections between user, artifact and event are presented. We designed an artifact to function as physical hypotheses [9] and show the design relevance of the model. In an experiment we investigate how the users feeling of involvement is influenced in relation to differentiations of the proposed theoretical model. The results of our experiment show that indeed perceptual crossing between user and artifact influences the users feeling of involvement with the artifact in their common space. We conclude with describing several design notions important for designing for perceptive activity in artifacts.

Freedom of fun, freedom of interaction

The modernist tradition still drives our society and our scientific endeavors. Modernity stood for technology push, progress through industry, linearity, money, the abstract, and the logical. But it has resulted in a feeling of uneasiness, even coldness. That is why, we think, there is now such a drive to get human and societal values back in the equation: Think of human-centered engineering, the experience economy, funology, and the like. In this article we give an example of the direction interaction-design research might take. We describe an approach that exploits all human skills, including perceptual-motor and emotional skills. We then reflect on the question of why industry has been slow to adopt this approach.

There is more in a single touch: mapping the continuous to the discrete

In this paper, we present the Sensible Alternative, a concept that enables smart-phone users to navigate between applications by accessing action-possibility-depending and personalized-associated applications. A single added touch-sensitive spot on the back-side of the smart-phone provides an alternative layer of interaction between human and machine, on top of hierarchical system architectures. We designed and prototyped this interaction layer that exploits the advantage of the continuous and the discrete powers of man and machine. In our case study, we explore several consequences of a phenomenological approach for designing complex systems, products and related services. Here we present the research-through-design case and our reflections based on qualitative expert confrontations on the heuristics and experience of the use case, the Sensible Alternative. With this work we hope to inspire design thinking to shift from hierarchical, procedural and structured design mechanisms to embodied mechanisms when addressing complexity.

E-scale: unity of location and time, increasing bandwidth and enhancing physical learning does matter

In this paper we explain that we focus on tangible interaction, because the physical world is inherently meaningful for people, i.e. we perceive the world in terms of what we can do with it, in terms of our skills. By physically interacting with the world this meaning emanates. We elucidate this principle by means of E-scale, a tangible device to enter answers on questionnaires into a computer. Meaning is created by coupling the graphical layout of the scales on the questionnaires, to the layout of buttons on E-scale, and by enabling to slide down E-scale along the scales while entering data. The results from our experiment show that unity of location and time, increasing bandwidth by controlling multiple parameters simultaneously and physical learning and thus development of bodily skills, increase usability (reduce time) as well as experience (overall satisfaction). We hope that sharing the rationale behind our TEI designs and research might contribute to the discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of TEI.

The shared worlds of industrial design TU/e and philips research

In this exhibition booth at the Design Vignettes venue we show through projects, demos and information the joined worlds of the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Research, Eindhoven. We show through the results of different joined and related projects, how we envision that design can transform society through intelligent systems, products and related services, and how we can and are educating a new type of designer who is working in the realm of ambient intelligence and who is able to join the worlds of design, engineering and science.