A Contextual Look at Tangible Interactions
What would digital information feel like if we could touch it? How would the physical properties of analog objects modify the experience of understanding digital information? These questions inevitably raise more questions, but maybe the most obvious is: why do we care? There is a gap between how information in the digital world and that of the physical is consumed, processed, and understood. “Human experience is founded on knowledge of the physical world,”1 so how can we create meaningful experiences in the digital world? By bridging the space between the two it is possible to create a synergistic relationship, where by the mediating influence of a product/service/space can foster understanding.
More and more, designers need to marry the idea of designing content and designing a product/service/space in tangent; they should not be considered mutually exclusive. When designed in this fashion it can help foster the most immersive and comprehensive experience. Paul Rand states, “the goal of the designer [is] to be persuasive or at least informative… [they] must anticipate the spectator’s reactions and meet his own aesthetic needs. He must therefore discover a means of communication between himself and the spectator – to discover an [interaction] universally comprehensible, one that translates abstract ideas into concrete forms”2. Important words to note here are “anticipate” and “discover” as they lead us back to a simple foundation in communication. Successful interactions are based on an exchange of information where “influence or effectiveness are concerned with the success with which the meaning conveyed to the receiver leads to the desired conduct on his part”3. Now, if all of human experience is founded on the physical world, then it becomes apparent that finding inspiration for designing effective interactions should come from, and relate to, the tangible. Instead of “anticipating” or “discovering” it might be more useful to create something “intuitive” and “contextual.”
Examining human-computer interface design provides a clear history and timeline that shows the shift towards a more natural user experience, based on tangible interactions. Originally starting with command line interface (CLI,) it was “a series of request-response transactions, with requests expressed as textual commands in a specialized vocabulary”4. Trying to appeal more to users through symbols, graphical user interface (GUI) saw its start when it presented “information in the form of pixels on bit-mapped displays. These graphical representations are manipulated with generic remote controllers”5. GUI stayed around for a while, waiting until the technology could essentially catch up to provide more “realistic” representations. Tangible user interface (TUI), which is able to “give physical form to digital information… [making] digital information directly manipulatable with our hands and perceptible through our peripheral senses through its physical embodiment”6 is an attempt at this realism. Another being natural user interface (NUI), which “exploits skills that we have acquired through a lifetime of living in this world.” All of this is not to say that a natural or tangible interface best meets the needs of a user, but rather it illustrates the need for tangible interactions that offer “a set of clear and easy to understand actions and reactions between agent(s) and agency, all for the purpose of doing or expressing something”8. This accepted progression of interface elements underpins the thought that humans respond best towards tangible, intuitive, and direct, communication.
Over the last few decades’ digital perforation into the physical world has been more and more apparent. Can we still trust that this “accepted progression” is leading us to the correct path? Human’s quest for technology and exciting new things is insatiable, it’s the “always approaching, but never quite there,” and it is navigated by interactions. Cool things don’t just become “cool” based on looks alone any more. If a product, service, or space is unpleasant to use, if the experience is not gratifying, people will move on. Interactions, and more specifically usefulness, ease of use, and comprehension, play a large role in shaping success.
Interaction design is contextual, it can be applied across all subjects, but to be effective it must remain focused on the problem at hand. “In the process of application, the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems and issues of specific circumstances”9. Hoping to solve one of these problems a relevant and clear message needs to be constructed and sent, this is paramount to creating an effective interaction. If the message is correctly received it should produce the proper response. “Man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, and demonstrating”10. These are all contextual as well, and based on personal histories and experiences. What one man does is different than another, even though the input is the same; so, you can conclude that what is significant, is the medium. As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “… the medium is the message”11.
The medium chosen is representative of much more than its form though, mainly due to the influence of symbolic interactionism12. This theory works off of three premises, the first being the idea that “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they have for them.” The second premise states that the meanings are based off of interactions with other people, and the third proposes that, “these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.” So although all of our knowledge may be found in the physical world, it arises from and is inspired by people as they interact. Symbolic interactionism helps define appropriate actions and reactions of the agents as they are created through a process of designation and interpretation. This in reality assists forming tangible interactions, as they should be designed in such a way that it is unconsciously expected, it should feel natural, but with its intent not obvious.
Recently, I worked on a project using body language to inspire tangible interactions within a design framework. Essentially the projects called for taking already formed and valid tangible interactions and examine, abstract, translate and apply them to a new medium; in a word, it was to ‘inspire.’ When trying to understand body language, we found many commonalities but in addition many different interpretations of what body language meant to different people. Largely though, we found many of these divergent interpretations went away when context was applied. To create a successful tangible interaction will be a bit of a balancing act; it will need to engage distinct ‘agents’ with different background knowledge in a way that they will lead to the messages receiver performing the desired response. Maintaining “a set of clear and easy to understand actions and reactions between agent(s) and agency [within a context,] all for the purpose of doing or expressing something”8, that is a tangible interaction, and a powerful communication tool.
With an influx of technology and information based in the digital world, rather than the physical, we may have found ourselves at a crossroads when it comes to different generations. While the elderly still lay claim to their experiences and knowledge being firmly rooted in the physical world, young “digital babies” have found much of their own knowledge and experiences brought about by the digital world. In the future the world is going to merge the physical and digital together to a point soon where they will be indistinguishable from one another. They will work synergistically to create an augmented world that efficiently delivers information to people. But these new systems may change the very way we interact with the objects, environment, and people around us. There is a tendency to believe that physical objects hold more value, but that is because they are familiar and understood by us, to “digital babies” there is no weighted value placed on one or the other because to them they are the same. At the moment tangible interactions seem an effective mediating influence between people and products, but what will we do when we just need to think to make something happen, how will we make that meaningful?
References
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/LarryLarsen/CES-2010-NUI-with-Bill-Buxton/.2010.
8. Michael Lai, “Tangible Interactions,” 2011
9. Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” 1995.
10. Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, (New York, 1952), 25.
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