Interaction between nearby strangers: serendipity and playfulness

“Nearby strangers” provides an interestingly paradoxical space for interaction design. There are various social norms, cultural practices, and privacy concerns hindering interaction with nearby strangers, but by ignoring them, people constantly miss social opportunities. Technology enabling ad-hoc interactions between co-located people has been explored for years in research but real-life applications are still rare. The potential focus areas include increasing awareness of social possibilities; light-weight playful interactions, play and gaming; serendipitous and ad hoc social interaction; anonymous exchange of content; matching interests for various purposes; icebreakers and provocation to interact, and ambient representation of the nearby strangers. This workshop convenes researchers and practitioners to gather and advance the state of research on interactions between nearby strangers. We aim to explore this design space and collaboratively identify new research and design opportunities that novel communication technology creates

Emotional Durability Design Nine: A Tool for Product Longevity

How can we develop products that consumers want to use for longer? The lifetime of electrical products is an ongoing concern in discussions about the circular economy. It is an issue that begins at an industry level, but that directly influences the way in which consumers use and discard products. Through a series of workshops and knowledge exchange sessions with Philips Lighting, this paper identifies which design factors influence a consumer’s tendency to retain their products for longer. These were distilled into a guiding framework for new product developers—The Emotional Durability Design Nine—consisting of nine themes: relationships, narratives, identity, imagination, conversations, consciousness, integrity, materiality, and evolvability. These nine themes are complemented by 38 strategies that help in the development of more emotionally engaging product experiences. We propose that the framework can be applied at multiple points during the new product development process to increase the likelihood that ‘emotion building’ features are integrated into an end product

Physical Paper as the User Interface for an Architectural Design Tool

Early architectural design is a typical example where traditional design tools such as sketching on paper still dominate over computer-assisted tools. Augmented reality is presented as a promising approach towards developing an interaction style that preserves the naturalness of the traditional way of designing, while at the same time providing access to new media. Using the Visual Interaction Platform (VIP-3), a first prototype tool that supports a combination of virtual and physical paper has been realized. We discuss some of the unsolved problems and potential benefits of a user interface based on physical paper

Supporting atomic user actions on the table

One of the biggest obstacles that application developers and designers face is a lack of understanding of how to support basic/atomic user interactions. User actions, such as pointing, selecting, scrolling and menu navigation, are often taken for granted in desktop GUI interactions, but have no equivalent interaction techniques in tabletop systems. In this chapter we present a review of the state-of-the-art in interaction techniques for selecting, pointing, rotating, and scrolling. We, first, identify and classify existing techniques, then summarize user studies that were performed with these techniques, and finally identify and formulate design guidelines based on the solutions found

Empirical evaluation of performance in hybrid 3d and 2d interfaces

Abstract: Experimental studies of spatial input devices have focused on demonstrating either the superiority of 3D input devices over 2D input devices, or the superiority of bimanual interaction over unimanual interaction. In this paper, we argue that hybrid interfaces that combine a 3D input device with a 2D input device have received little attention up to now and are potentially very useful. We demonstrate by means of an experimental evaluation that working with hybrid interfaces can indeed provide superior performance compared to strictly 3D and 2D interfaces