Hand in hand with the material: designing for suppleness

Designing for a supple interaction, involving users bodily and emotionally into a ‘dance’ with a system is a challenging task. Any break-ups in interaction become fatal to the sensual, fluent, bodily and social experience sought. A user-centered, iterative design cycle is therefore required. But getting to know the affordances of the digital material used to build the application plays an equally important role in the design process. The ‘feel’ of the digital material properties sometimes even determines what the design should be. We describe three situations in which the properties and affordances of sensor network technologies guided our design process of FriendSense – a system for expressing friendship and emotional closeness through movement. We show how the sensor node look and feel, choice of sensors, limitations of the radio signal strength and coverage, as well as iterative prototyping to properly exploit the software/algorithmic possibilities guided our design proce...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Petra Sundström, Kristina Höök
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Design Process, Digital Material, Human Computer Interaction, Sensor Node