Sag Stephan Wensveen

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.

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.

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.

Exploring sociality and engagement in play through game-control distribution

This study explores how distributing the controls of a video game among multiple players affects the sociality and engagement experienced in game play. A video game was developed in which the distribution of game controls among the players could be varied, thereby affecting the abilities of the individual players to control the game. An experiment was set up in which eight groups of three players were asked to play the video game while the distribution of the game controls was increased in three steps. After each playing session, the players’ experiences of sociality and engagement were assessed using questionnaires. The results showed that distributing game control among the players increased the level of experienced sociality and reduced the level of experienced control. The game in which the controls were partly distributed led to the highest levels of experienced engagement, because the game allowed social play while still giving the players a sense of autonomy. The implications for interaction design are discussed.

Designing for perceptual crossing: designing and comparing three behaviors

Perceptual crossing is the reciprocal interplay of perceiving while being perceived. In this paper we discuss the last iteration of our ongoing research project on designing for perceptive qualities in systems of interactive products. We describe the design of explorative behavior in an artifact to enable the artifact and a person to engage in perceptual crossing. The explorative behavior is compared to the following and active behavior, the results of two earlier iterations. Through the iterations we formulated, applied and evaluated design relevant knowledge in the form of seven design notions. These notions inform design-researchers and design-practitioners on how to design for perceptive qualities in systems of interactive products. Here we specifically focus on how the artifact detects active perceptive behavior of a person, and how the artifact becomes aware of bygone perception and anticipates on future perception. An experiment shows how participants preferred the resulting explorative behavior that is closest to our theoretical framework based on phenomenology.

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.

Light Behavior Design: Violation of Unification Principles and the Effect on the User Experience

Technological advances increase the possibilities for the aesthetics of interaction and the user experience. This is a growing field in the Human-Computer Interaction community (HCI). However, Lenz et al. [3] show that little is known about the relation between experiences and interaction. The current study explores this relation through the design of an interactive lamp. We compare a direct and a delayed coupling between the users action and the reaction of the light. The results provide empirical evidence that deliberately violating one of the unification principles (i.e., delayed response) triggers a more positively engaged experience. We discuss the result and further implications for design research.