Pr Philip Ross

The case of sculpting atmospheres: towards design principles for expressive tangible interaction in control of ambient systems

According to the vision of Ambient Intelligence, technology will seamlessly merge into people’s everyday activities and environments. A challenge facing designers of such systems is to create interfaces that fit in people’s everyday contexts and incorporate the values of daily life. This paper focuses on tangible expressive interaction as one possible approach towards linking everyday experiences to intuitive forms of interaction and presents a number of principles for expressive interaction design in this field. A case study of a tangible expressive interface to control a living room atmosphere projection system (orchestrating living room lighting, audio and video-art) is presented to illustrate and reflect upon the design principles. Furthermore, the case study describes possible techniques towards integrating the design principles into a design method.

A designerly critique on enchantment

To develop the concept of user experience in HCI, McCarthy et al. introduce the notion of enchantment in interaction design. They describe five sensibilities that support exploration and evaluation in design for enchantment. In this paper, we discuss design for enchantment in light of our approach to design for interaction, called design for meaningful mediation. Based on our experiences from case studies, we argue that ‘considering the whole person with feelings, desires and anxieties’, one of the sensibilities McCarthy et al. formulate, influences the desirability and realisation of the other four sensibilities. By way of case studies, we show how we explored the link between ‘the whole person’ and desired interaction experience in a designerly way. We place enchantment in a context of other interaction experiences and demonstrate possible design techniques relevant to design for interaction experiences, including enchantment.

A design approach to socially adaptive lighting environments

Historically light has been a catalyst for social life to emerge. In recent years of lighting research the social effect of light has been underexposed. The environments we occupy on a daily basis are used for a wider variety of activities. Consequently, lighting conditions need to become sensitive to adapt to the variety of activities being performed. We argue that the effect of light on the social relations between people needs to be considered in order to make adaptive lighting environments viable. To design a socially adaptive lighting environment an approach needs to be used that is iterative, experiential and involves multiple users in an actual context. The design process is described in three stages (Interactive Sketching, a Design Experiment and Socially Situated Adaptive Experience); for each stage the aims, the setup, results and lessons learned are provided. In this process an experimental environment is used, named Incubation environment, which is set up as a dining environment and equipped with computer controllable lighting armatures. In the final design stage the Socially Situated Adaptive Experience technique is described and is found a suitable technique to design socially adaptive lighting environments.

A user experience-based approach to home atmosphere control

The complex control problem of creating home atmospheres using light, music, and projected wall-art can be reduced by focusing on desired experience, rather than product functions and features. A case study is described in which subjective interpretations of living room atmospheres were measured and embedded into a prototype display system. A personalization mechanism is proposed to manage individual differences in atmosphere ratings, enabling a user model to evolve over time. To create a meaningful and simple control mechanism for a wide range of users, three interfaces were developed and studied, ranging from concrete to abstract control and from structured to exploratory navigation.