Designing for Rich Interaction: Integrating Form, Interaction, and Function

Speaker
Joep Frens
Assistant Professor, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

The subject of the lecture is human-product interaction, particularly interaction with consumer products. With the rise of interactive products the information-for-use that these products offered gradually becomes abstracted, it addresses man’s cognitive skills. I present the search for rich interaction, a new interaction paradigm for interactive products that aims to make information-for-use accessible for all of peoples’ skills. A research through design approach is followed. Five conceptual cameras were designed to explore the solution domain for this new paradigm. One of the camera proposals was elaborated into a modular, working prototype. The prototype accepts one of four different, systematically varied, interface modules to make it possible to compare different interaction-styles within the same form-language. Each of the interface modules reflects a different interaction-style. Together they span a range of interaction-styles from rich to conventional. An experiment was set up to investigate the qualities of the four interaction styles and to compare the rich interaction paradigm to the more conventional interaction paradigm. The analyses of the experimental results indicate that aesthetic interaction is present in the rich interactive camera while it is not present in the conventional camera. Moreover, the rich interactive camera is not found to differ on efficiency and effectivity from the conventional camera.

Speaker's Bio

Joep Frens was born on the 11th of September, 1974 in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. After obtaining his master degree in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) he went to Switserland to pursue a career in research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He returned to the Netherlands as a PhD student. In 2006 he received a doctoral diploma from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (the Netherlands) on a thesis called: Designing for Rich Interaction: Integrating Form, Interaction, and Function. Presently he is assistant professor at the same university. He teaches several courses at bachelor and master level and continues his research on designing for interaction.

Host
John Zimmerman