Week 8: Our Concept Moving Forward and Building a Presentation

Week 8 involved an explanation and understanding of Interaction Design by Lecturer Jared Donovan. A leader in Gestural and User Experience Design who outlined some key Theory on Two Types of Interaction, Semantic and Action-Centred Design Approaches.

Semantics involves physical representations of concepts, interactions or information. These physical representations can be manipulated and moved around. The gestures however, are minimal, the users movements and actions generally dont inform or influence the interaction. Also, from examples seen, many values with an the interaction produce discrete responses. For example, the most things are either "On" or "Off", this is due to the aforementioned lack of human interaction which is naturally varied

Examples of Semantic Design:

1. Music Cube:
As can be seen below the small balls are physical representations of a musical note. This icon is arbitrary and when it is placed at certain point above the air pressure device, it creates a certain note. The value of the interaction is discrete and does not respond to specific behaviour of a user.

An Action Centred approach, on the other hand is based within the physical. The interaction with the product is based on how the user moves. Unlike Semantic Interactions which are based in a physical representation.

1. The LightRail

As opposed to the previous semantic designs,  the light rail  is the oppositie. Overall, it is a great example of action centred design. The project effortless creates a dialogue, a system of interaction and feedback, with the user. As the dancer moves, the lightrail responds to her touch. Values are not discrete as the level of light output as well as the location of the light depend subtle interactions with the user. Finally, the user themselves is the key input into the interaction. Rather than a arbitrary icon, the design is operated by the user. As you can see, it responds to her movements

2. Zygote Interactive Music Ball

http://vimeo.com/802394

Note: this video may not work on final blog post. Please Follow link above for the original source.

The Zygote Interactive music ball is, I believe, another example of an action-centred interaction design. The ball responds to the natural human movements of the user as people play with device in a giant crowd. The ball facilitates an expression of human emotions through the concert. Once again, the human touch is the input on the interaction and the device responds to continuous data from the user

However, what I find fascinating is that this design does not simply react and interact with one user. On the contrary, the design is a tool which facilitates interaction with a whole crowd of people. Also, the product facilitates interaction between a crowd AND performer/main event. Personally, this really opened my eyes to the potential scale of interaction design. Previously, I believe I had got stuck in the way I was thinking about a one on one, person to product interaction. This design creates an interaction from one product to a variety of different people.



Group Concept Development:

At Present, we are still grappling with creating and resolving the "Triad" of design elements for this project. We have a hierarchical communication tool which is used to translate information from a manager/superior to an employee.

Some group concept sketches can be seen here

However, what I'm finding difficult to process is that anything we come up with in this present context already exists in a better way out in the world. I believe that we are going to have to rethink our context and solutions in the future.