Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales is an exploration of the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of industrial design and its potential to bring about social change for the users of electronic objects. It is a provoking and – to first-time readers – positively alarming social commentary on the interrelationship between electronic product design and culture, and the powerful but largely under-explored potential of electronic innovation to trigger social awareness. Hertzian Tales proposes an innovative approach to critical design and therefore serves as a reflection on and a critique of the commercial design practices at large. In this second edition, Dunne reiterates the original rationale for his project: a concern that the majority of industrial designers have unwittingly joined a treadmill culture of post-industrial mass-production – turning out electronic goods that have long simply met the brief of an optimally functioning and eagerly consumable technology.

Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design

Force feedback and shape change are modalities with a growing application potential beyond the more traditional GUIs. We present two studies that explored the effect of these modalities on the emotional experience when interacting with an intelligent thermostat. The first study compared visual feedback, force feedback, and a combination of force feedback and shape change. Results indicate that force feedback correlates to experienced dominance during interaction, while shape change mainly affects experienced arousal. The second study explored how force feedback and shape change could communicate affective meaning during interaction with the thermostat through a co-design study. Participants designed the thermostat behavior for three scenarios supporting energy savings. Results suggest that despite their abstractness, force feedback and shape change convey affective meaning during the user-system dialogue. The findings contribute to the design of intelligible and intuitive feedback.

Ripple Thermostat: Affecting the Emotional Experience through Interactive Force Feedback and Shape Change

The field of Shape-Changing Interfaces explores the qualities of physically dynamic artifacts. At furniture-scale, such artifacts have the potential of changing the ways we collaborate and engage with interiors and physical spaces. Informed by theories of proxemics, empirical studies of informal meetings and design work with shape-changing furniture, we develop the notion of proxemic transitions. We present three design aspects of proxemic transitions: transition speed, stepwise reconfiguration, and radical shifts. The design aspects focus on how to balance between physical and digital transformations in designing for proxemic transitions. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) the notion of proxemic transitions, 2) three design aspects to consider in designing for proxemic transitions, and 3) initial exploration of how these design aspects might generate designs of dynamic furniture. These contributions outline important aspects to consider when designing shape-changing furniture for informal workplace meetings.

Proxemic Transitions: Designing Shape-Changing Furniture for Informal Meetings

Creating visual imagery helps us to situate ourselves within unknown worlds, processes, make connections, and find solutions. By exploring drawn ideas for novel technologies, we can examine the implications of their place in the world. Drawing, or sketching, for future inquiry in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can be a stand-alone investigative approach, part of a wider ‘world-building’ in design fiction, or simply ideation around a concept. By examining instances of existing practice in HCI, in this paper we establish recommendations and rationales for those wishing to utilise sketching and drawing within their research. We examine approaches ranging from ideation, diagramming, scenario building, comics creation and artistic representation to create a model for sketching and drawing as future inquiry for HCI. This work also reflects on the ways in which these arts can inform and elucidate research and practice in HCI, and makes recommendations for the field, within its teaching, processes and outcomes.

/pdf/sketching-drawing-as-future-inquiry-in-hci-2q91v3o400.pdf

Sketching & Drawing as Future Inquiry in HCI

We propose combining shape-changing interfaces and spatial augmented reality for extending the space of appearances and interactions of actuated interfaces. While shape-changing interfaces can dynamically alter the physical appearance of objects, the integration of spatial augmented reality additionally allows for dynamically changing objects' optical appearance with high detail. This way, devices can render currently challenging features such as high frequency texture or fast motion. We frame this combination in the context of computer graphics with analogies to established techniques for increasing the realism of 3D objects such as bump mapping. This extensible framework helps us identify challenges of the two techniques and benefits of their combination. We utilize our prototype shape-changing device enriched with spatial augmented reality through projection mapping to demonstrate the concept. We present a novel mechanical distance-fields algorithm for real-time fitting of mechanically constrained shape-changing devices to arbitrary 3D graphics. Furthermore, we present a technique for increasing effective screen real estate for spatial augmented reality through view-dependent shape change.

/pdf/combining-shape-changing-interfaces-and-spatial-augmented-37ve6l9oo4.pdf

Combining Shape-Changing Interfaces and Spatial Augmented Reality Enables Extended Object Appearance

Despite an increasing number of examples of shape-changing interfaces, the relation between users' actions and product movements has not gained a great deal of attention, nor been very well articulated. This paper presents a framework articulating the level of control offered to the user over the shape change. The framework considers whether the shape change is: 1) directly controlled by the user's explicit interactions; 2) negotiated with the user; 3) indirectly controlled by the users actions; 4) fully controlled by the system. The four types are described through design examples using ReFlex, a shape-changing interface in the form of a smartphone. The paper concludes that shape-changing interfaces tend to assign the control to either the user or the underlying system, while few (e.g. [16,28]) consider sharing the control between the user and the system.

Balancing User and System Control in Shape-Changing Interfaces: a Designerly Exploration

Hand-drawn sketches can be an easy way for HCI researchers to communicate and express ideas, as well as to document, explore and communicate concepts between the researcher and user, collaborator, manager or client. These sketches are fast, lightweight, easy to create, and -- by varying their fidelity -- they can be used in all stages of the HCI research and design process. Here, we aim to explore themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs in the form of visual records, articles and papers that review and promote this technique in HCI as a field: 'SketchingDIS: Hand-drawn sketching in HCI' SketchingDIS.wordpress.com, a one-day workshop will bring together researchers from various disciplines that have incorporated hand-drawn sketching into their everyday research practice, to share knowledge and methodologies, generate ideas, practice collaborative sketching, and to discuss the future of hand-drawn sketching in HCI and DIS itself.

/pdf/sketchingdis-hand-drawn-sketching-in-hci-iuh7e9e7pu.pdf

SketchingDIS: Hand-drawn Sketching in HCI

Hitmachine empowers children to make music through building physical, shared interactive instruments from Lego Mindstorms™ and playing them to a beat. The design rationale for Hitmachine draws upon the collective interaction model, theories of proxemics and F-formations, as well as a framework for social interaction. Hitmachine was evaluated during a 4-day workshop where 150 children aged 3-13 engaged with the system. Based on lessons from this workshop we point to key issues to consider when designing for collective music making. This includes designing for multiple access points and spatial orientation of these, designing for sense of impact as well as sense of control, and giving careful consideration to how the spatial configuration of technological artifacts and furniture can provide opportunities for social interaction.

Designing for Children's Collective Music Making: How Spatial Orientation and Configuration Matter

In this paper, we present three speculative scenarios that explore the future of living with shape-changing interfaces. Each scenario is concerned with one area of this potential future. Three areas, which originated in a workshop with 25 researchers, are considered: 1) shape as a service, 2) security and trust, and 3) personalization and materiality. Each scenario is critically reflected. We use speculative scenarios as an evocative way of illustrating future possibilities, beyond the limitations of current technology. We point to future challenges that the research community needs to address, so that shape-changing interfaces can successfully venture out, into people's homes and lives.

Envisioning Future Challenges and Possibilities for Shape-Changing Interfaces through Speculative Scenarios

We present six rotary knobs, each with a distinct shape, that provide haptic force feedback on rotation. The knob shapes were evaluated in relation to twelve haptic feedback stimuli. The stimuli were designed as a combination of the most relevant perceptual parameters of force feedback; acceleration, friction, detent amplitude and spacing. The results indicate that there is a relationship between the shape of a knob and its haptic feedback. The perceived functionality can be dynamically altered by changing its shape and haptic feedback. This work serves as basis for the design of dynamic interface controls that can adapt their shape and haptic feel to the content that is controlled. In our demonstration, we show the six distinct knobs shapes with the different haptic feedback stimuli. Attendees can experience the interaction with the different knob shapes in relation the stimuli and design stimuli with a graphical editor.

Majken Kirkegård Rasmussen

Papers

Balancing User and System Control in Shape-Changing Interfaces: a Designerly Exploration

SketchingDIS: Hand-drawn Sketching in HCI

Designing for Children's Collective Music Making: How Spatial Orientation and Configuration Matter

Envisioning Future Challenges and Possibilities for Shape-Changing Interfaces through Speculative Scenarios

Knobology 2.0: Giving Shape to the Haptic Force Feedback of Interactive Knobs