Easy doesn’t do it: skill and expression in tangible aesthetics

Abstract

In this paper, we articulate the role of movement within a perceptual-motor view of tangible interaction. We argue that the history of human-product interaction design has exhibited an increasing neglect of the intrinsic importance of movement. On one hand, human-product interaction design has shown little appreciation in practice of the centrality of our bodily engagement in the world. This has resulted in technologies that continue to place demands on our cognitive abilities, and deny us the opportunity of building bodily skill. On the other hand, the potential for movement in products to be a meaningful component of our interaction with them has also been ignored. Both of these directions (design for bodily engagement and the expressiveness of product movements) are sketched out, paying particular respect for their potential to impact both interaction aesthetics and usability. We illustrate a number of these ideas with examples.

Resonant Bits

“…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]. In particular, Resonant Bits supports new methods of exploring affordance and 'feedforward' [14] in tangible interaction, by revealing to the user partial outcomes of an action before it is completed.…”

Measuring Semantic and Emotional Responses to Bio-inspired Design

“…These sources of inspiration are an essential base in design thinking such as definition of context, and triggers for idea generation (Eckert and Stacey, 2000). Indeed this kind of analogy helps them to provide a high expressivity, a high level of creativity, and a high emotional impact into the design solutions (Wang, 1995;Djajadiningrat, Matthews, and Stienstra, 2007).…”

Embodying Embodied Design Research Techniques

“…Caroline Hummels, Kees Overbeeke and Klooster [7], for example, have long championed the need for the designer as movement expert, foregrounding the expressive power of gesture. Tom Djajadiningrat, Ben Matthews and Marcelle Stienstra [4] stress the importance of skilled action when designing interaction, bringing focus to the experience of use. Yet others focus on designing representations of movement, evaluating the user experience, mapping interactions, or exploring sensing technologies [13].…”