Exploring Physicality in the Design Process

The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the products themselves are becoming increasingly digital. Although our whole world is turning ever more digital, our bodies and minds are naturally conceived to interact with the physical. Very often, in the design of user-targeted information appliances, the physical and digital processes are formulated separately and usually, due to cost factors, they are only brought together for user testing at the end of the development process. This not only makes major design changes more difficult but it can also significantly affect the users’ level of acceptance of the product and their experience of use. It is therefore imperative that designers explore the relationship between the physical and the digital form early on in the development process, when one can rapidly work through different sets of ideas. The key to gaining crucial design information from products lies in the construction of meaningful prototypes. This paper specifically examines how physical materials are used during the early design stage and seeks to explore whether the inherent physical properties of these artefacts and the way that designers interpret and manipulate them have a significant impact on the design process. We present the findings of a case study based on information gathered during a design exercise. Detailed analysis of the recordings reveals far more subtle patterns of behaviour than expected. These include the ways in which groups move between abstract and concrete discussions, the way groups comply with or resist the materials they are given, and the complex interactions between the physicality of materials and the group dynamics. This understanding is contributing to ongoing research in the context of our wider agenda of explicating the fundamental role of physicality in the design of hybrid physical and digital artefacts.

Keywords: Physicality; Digitality; Product Design; Design Process; Prototyping; Materials

Sociality, Physicality and Spatiality: touching private and public displays

This paper considers two strands of research that each contributes to an understanding of touch-based interaction with private and public displays.  The first is based on general frameworks for private device–public display interaction, which is driven by the growing body of work in the area, but focuses on the level of integration of public and private devices and the importance of understanding social setting and bystanders. The second strand is centred on physicality; how different kinds of physical device impact interaction and how modelling of touch-based devices causes particular problems that require notations and formalisms of continuous and bodily interaction.

Keywords: public displays, touch interaction, spatial interaction, physicality

Modelling Devices for Natural Interaction

We do not interact with systems without first performing some physical action on a physical device. This paper shows how formal notations and formal models can be developed to account for the relationship between the physical devices that we actually press, twist or pull and their effects on systems. We use state diagrams of each but find we have to extend these in order to account for features such as bounce-back,

where buttons or other controls are sprung. Critical to all is the fact that we are physical creatures and so formal models have to take into account that physicality.

Keywords: physicality, interaction modelling, affordance, natural interaction, physical devices

Full paper (pre-proceedings version, PDF, 840K)