Jw Joep Frens

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.

Design research & tangible interaction

The research on Tangible Interaction (TI) has been inspired by many different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI). Now that the field is getting more mature, in the sense that basic technologies and interaction paradigms have been explored, we observe a growing potential for a more design-oriented research approach. We suggest that there are several arguments for this proposed broadening of the TI-perspective: 1) the need for designing products within contexts-of-use that are much more challenging and diverse than the task-oriented desktop (or tabletop) systems that mostly inspire us today, 2) the interest to also design TI starting from existing physical activities instead of only as add-ons to digital applications, 3) the need for iterative design and evaluation of prototypes in order to develop applications that are grounded within daily practice over prolonged periods of time, and 4) the need to extend ease-of-use to more hedonic aspects of interaction such as fun and engagement

The reflective transformative design process

The department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology distinct itself through a unique combination of focus (designing highly intelligent systems, products, and related services) and education model (competency-centred learning). Based on the foundations of our department we identify three implications for our preferred design process: it is flexible and open, it values design action as a generator of knowledge and it is driven by a vision on the design opportunities that are afforded by emerging intelligent technology. In this paper we explain the reflective transformative design process and the rationale behind.

A rich user interface for a digital camera

In this design prospectus a digital camera with a rich user interface is presented. Rich interfaces borrow from tangible interaction and the concept of affordances. Next, a working prototype of this camera is presented. Finally, four systematic variations of the interface for this camera are shown.

Co-reflection: user involvement for highly dynamic design processes

User involvement in systems, products and related services design has increased considerably in relevance. The way user involvement actually progresses depends on how the users are situated in relation to the design process. Their influence may extend from the results of the design project to planning and managing the course of the design project. Sequential techniques developed for the rational problem solving or reflective process have a limited application in highly dynamic design processes. More precisely, in sequential design processes validation steers reflection into a single direction. For this reason, a methodological approach not based on the sequential (hypothetical-deductive) paradigm but on the dialectical inquiry (inductive paradigm) between designers and users is considered. The versatile and holistic nature of this co-reflective process makes it suitable for dynamic and unstructured design processes based on different streams of reflection.

Designing Disruptive Innovative Systems, Products and Services: RTD Process

There are well over hundred design processes described in literature, so why invent a new one? Over the last decade we have observed a need in our department for a process that emphasises different values than most current processes highlight. To start, we have seen a desire for a process that supports design-driven innovation, that is, we step away from incremental innovation in favour of disruptive innovation, in which disruptive refers to the absence of a well-established frame of reference for users or the market. Not only the product as such is new, but it also enables the creation of radical new meaning for the user, the market and society. We have seen a desire for design processes that can deal with this openness and complexity, in order to design open and intelligent systems that evolve during use, and which have a high level of complexity due to their adaptive, context-dependent and highly dynamic character. Next to this, the role of the designer is changing. More and more we see open platforms and design projects in which a variety of people and experts create products. We believe this has implications for the design processes used. Finally, we have seen the desire for a design process that fits self-directed learning instead of teacher-directed learning, which corresponds with educational theories like social constructivist learning. Based on these observations on the changing face of design we present the Reflective Transformative Design process (RTD process). It is a design process, particularly aimed to support the design of disruptive innovative and/or intelligent systems, products and services, that emphasises values like openness, contextand person dependency, envisioning a new society, intuition, craftsmanship and development through reflection. In this chapter, firstly, we elaborate on the changing field of the Industrial Design and the implications this has for design processes. Subsequently, we explain the rationale behind influential paradigms of design methodology and a variety of design processes, and show why they do not match the abovementioned changes and needs. Thereupon we introduce the Reflective Transformative Design process (RTD process) in detail. We explain how it works and elaborate on the rationale behind the model. We present the design processes of two projects, Other Brother and Ennea, to elucidate and discuss the possibilities of the RTD process to design disruptive innovative systems. We conclude the chapter by demarcating the position of the RTD process in comparison to existing processes and by explaining our plans for further development of the RTD process.

Participatory Public Media Arts for Social Creativity

New technologies and materials bring new opportunities to the forms of public arts. In this paper we look back to the three generations of public art forms, from traditional ones with static forms to newer ones with dynamic and then, interactive forms. We look forward to the fourth generation - participatory media arts, for which the artists and designers do not create the public media arts as a final result, but create them as platforms and growing systems for the public to participate and for social creativity to contribute to the artifact - the creation process, together with the results of this process, forms the dynamic media artifact that grows over time. The fourth generation is illustrated with an example of public media art installation designed for the Science and Education New Town, Taicang, China.

The Audio Adventurer: Design of a Portable Audio Adventure Game

In this paper we describe the design of a portable device for playing audio adventure games. This device enables the player to explore an audio world, interact with it, and solve challenges while a narrative evolves. To avoid the difficulties that can arise when freely navigating open spaces in audio-only worlds, we structured our audio world as a network of paths. Different ways of panning the audio to fit this model are proposed. Two initial rotational devices for navigating the audio world were created and evaluated: a relative and an absolute one. The relative one was worked out to a final prototype. Inventory functionality was added to increase the interactive possibilities and to make the device more expressive. Initial reactions were positive, but additional content and experiments are needed to investigate whether the Audio Adventurer can offer a long-lasting immersive and engaging experience.

Touching the dematerialized

Smart phones and tablet computers have flooded the world. With their seemingly intuitive multi-touch interface, they seem to be a step towards embodied interaction. But are they really? In this paper we take off with an analysis of these products and our interaction with them from the perspective of dematerialization. We claim that the multi-touch display is the outcome of a dematerialization process. As it is applied today, it fails to fulfil the promise of embodied interaction, since it results in an impoverished, standardized and computer-like interaction. Next, we introduce our own design perspective, the third stand, which aims to consciously guide dematerialization instead of blindly applying it. We believe this perspective leads to a fresh way of thinking about the multi-touch display. By presenting the design of a novel alarm clock, we emphasize the single-purpose character of the third stand and reveal its own specific nature. Next, in two design projects, we confront the third stand with the multi-touch display and enhance the latter with specific, meaningful and rich actions. We discuss the results of these two design projects and end this paper by reflecting on the third stand.

Cardboard modeling studio: a designerly exploration tool for rich and embodied interaction

Central to this studio is the question of how to design for rich and embodied (meaningful) interaction. We approach this question from a designerly perspective and find inspiration in the theory of ecological perception and in the domain of tangible and embodied interaction. As we aim for a meaningful interaction style that is firmly rooted in human experience and the diverse human skills, we present cardboard modeling as a designerly exploration tool that offers experiential insight into the solution domain of a given interaction design challenge. The studio has two distinct parts: part one aims at familiarizing the participants with the cardboard modeling technique and part two emphasizes the use of the cardboard modeling technique as an instrument to explore meaningful interaction. During the second part of the studio also the quality of the interaction solutions are discussed through presentations. The studio runs from 9.30h to approximately 17.00h.