An observational study of how objects support engineering design thinking and communication: implications for the design of tangible media (original) (raw)
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An observational study of how objects support engineering design thinking and communication
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '00, 2000
D e p a r t m e n t o f C o m p u t e r S c i e n c e and Electrical E n g i n e e r i n g U n i v e r s i t y o f Q u e e n s l a n d B r i s b a n e , Q L D 4 0 7 2 A u s t r a l i a + 6 1 -7 -3 3 6 5 -4 1 9 4 m a r g o t @ csee.uq, edu. au, m c g a r r y @ csee. uq.edu, au
2011
We identify an empirical gap in the application of an activity common to Participatory Design and Innovation, namely the tangible workshop. We suggest that tangibles or "things", while often used, remain under investigated in terms of their role in facilitating collaboration in Design and Innovation workshops. Not much is known as yet about how the participants in these workshops might make very different sense of such "things" depending on, for instance, who they are or the physical features of the "things" being employed. We thus propose a research agenda that systematically and empirically explores the role of "things" in design and innovation workshops, which will ensure that we can develop new practices or toolkits for workshops that are informed by empirically generated knowledge of how people make sense of "things".
Exploring Physicality in the Design Process
Published at the Design Research Society Conference 2008, 2008
The design process used in the development of many products we use daily and the nature of the products themselves are becoming increasingly digital. Although our whole world is turning ever more digital, our bodies and minds are naturally conceived to interact with the physical. Very often, in the design of user-targeted information appliances, the physical and digital processes are formulated separately and usually, due to cost factors, they are only brought together for user testing at the end of the development process. This not only makes major design changes more difficult but it can also significantly affect the users’ level of acceptance of the product and their experience of use. It is therefore imperative that designers explore the relationship between the physical and the digital form early on in the development process, when one can rapidly work through different sets of ideas. The key to gaining crucial design information from products lies in the construction of meaningful prototypes. This paper specifically examines how physical materials are used during the early design stage and seeks to explore whether the inherent physical properties of these artefacts and the way that designers interpret and manipulate them have a significant impact on the design process. We present the findings of a case study based on information gathered during a design exercise. Detailed analysis of the recordings reveals far more subtle patterns of behaviour than expected. These include the ways in which groups move between abstract and concrete discussions, the way groups comply with or resist the materials they are given, and the complex interactions between the physicality of materials and the group dynamics. This understanding is contributing to ongoing research in the context of our wider agenda of explicating the fundamental role of physicality in the design of hybrid physical and digital artefacts.
Measuring the Effect of Tangible Interaction on Design Cognition
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
Recent developments in interaction design provide gesture and tangible interaction as an alternative or complement to mouse, keyboard, and touch interaction. Tangible user interfaces provide affordances that encourage and facilitate specific actions on physical objects. There is evidence that gesture and action affect cognition, and therefore it is hypothesized that the affordances of tangible interaction will affect design cognition. In this paper we report on the analysis of experimental data in which participants are asked to make word combinations from a set of six nouns and give them meaning. The task is presented as a design task with references to function, behavior, and structure of the word combination meanings. The participants performed the task in two conditions: one in which grasping the words was afforded and one in which pointing at the words was afforded. We segmented and coded the verbal data using the function-behavior-structure coding scheme to compare the participants' references to design issues across the two conditions. The results show that the two conditions differ in the phase in which they search for word combinations and the phase in which they described new meanings.
Design research and tangible interaction
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference, 2007
The research on Tangible Interaction (TI) has been inspired by many different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI). Now that the field is getting more mature, in the sense that basic technologies and interaction paradigms have been explored, we observe a growing potential for a more design-oriented research approach. We suggest that there are several arguments for this proposed broadening of the TI-perspective: 1) the need for designing products within contexts-of-use that are much more challenging and diverse than the task-oriented desktop (or tabletop) systems that mostly inspire us today, 2) the interest to also design TI starting from existing physical activities instead of only as add-ons to digital applications, 3) the need for iterative design and evaluation of prototypes in order to develop applications that are grounded within daily practice over prolonged periods of time, and 4) the need to extend easeof-use to more hedonic aspects of interaction such as fun and engagement
Exploring Tacit and Tangible Interaction Design: Towards an Intuitive Design Tool
Our [re]search is aiming at the identification of essential voids in the support of design processes offered by commonly available methods and tools. Some remarkable results were obtained during design sessions with novices and experts by engaging them in tangible experiments that were designed to stimulate and enhance their skills, tacit knowing and creativity that enable them to represent their ideas and concepts in an intuitive way. We explored and captured the differences in designer's behavior during use of "analogue" and digital representation tools. We will explain our laboratory experiments, test results, educational embedding and creative opportunities that emerge from hybrid design tools. Furthermore we propose an exciting hybrid design tool to bring the tacit and tangible elements of design back into CAD systems. We follow two different routes in our attempt to identify and fill the voids. In the first procedure is a set of observations to measure the effectiveness, various shaping and representation techniques. Knowledge about learning curves, time constraints, idiosyncrasy, quality of design results and focus of particular design methods gives insight in peoples abilities to improve and support decisions about the structure and content of the "best" curriculum for industrial design engineering students. The second procedure is the creation of a prototype of a hybrid design tool to stimulate intuitive and imaginative skills. For the experiments, we used nine (9) haptic representational configurations and set-ups, and involved over 95 participants per experiment. In these configurations the participant's performance of form giving and shaping techniques were captured, observed and rated.
Design research & tangible interaction
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction - TEI '07, 2007
The research on Tangible Interaction (TI) has been inspired by many different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI). Now that the field is getting more mature, in the sense that basic technologies and interaction paradigms have been explored, we observe a growing potential for a more design-oriented research approach. We suggest that there are several arguments for this proposed broadening of the TI-perspective: 1) the need for designing products within contexts-of-use that are much more challenging and diverse than the task-oriented desktop (or tabletop) systems that mostly inspire us today, 2) the interest to also design TI starting from existing physical activities instead of only as add-ons to digital applications, 3) the need for iterative design and evaluation of prototypes in order to develop applications that are grounded within daily practice over prolonged periods of time, and 4) the need to extend easeof-use to more hedonic aspects of interaction such as fun and engagement
Tangible interactions in a digital age: Medium and graphic visualization in design journals
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 2009
Designers are interacting with an increasing number of digital tools in their design process; however, these are usually in addition to the traditional and ubiquitous paper-based design journals. This paper explores the medium of informal design information and its relationships with sketching behavior over three stages of the design process: preliminary investigation and user needs analyses, concept generation and development, and prototyping and testing. Our test bed consists of tangible, digital, and hybrid design journals collected from four semesters of UC Berkeley's graduate level, multidisciplinary course titled “Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methods.” We developed protocols for two categories of analysis: one that codes for the media type of each journal and its content, and another one that characterizes the content within the journal. We found a trend toward hybrid digital–tangible journals for the engineering students over the 4-year ...
How Tangible Mock-Ups Support Design Collaboration
Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 2007
This paper is a contribution to a more conscious use of tangible mock-ups in collaborative design processes. It describes a design team's use of mockups in a series of workshops involving potential customers and users. Focus is primarily on the use of three-dimensional design mock-ups and how differences in these affected the dialogue. Reflective conversations were established by using tangible mock-ups as "things-to-think with". They served as boundary objects that spanned the gap between the different competencies and interests of participants in design. The design mock-ups evoked different things from different participants whereas the challenge for the design team was to find boundaries upon which everybody could agree. The level of details represented in a mock-up affected the communication so that a mock-up with few details evoked different issues whereas a very detailed mock-up evoked a smaller variation of issues resulting in a more focused communication.