People rely on implicit interaction in their everyday interactions with one another to exchange queries, offers, responses, and feedback without explicit communication. A look with the eyes, a wave of the hand, the lift of the door handle—small moves can do a lot to enable joint action with elegance and economy. This work puts forward a theory that these implicit patterns of interaction with one another drive our expectations of how we should interact with devices. I introduce the Implicit Interaction Framework as a tool to map out interaction trajectories, and we use these trajectories to better understand the interactions transpiring around us. By analyzing everyday implicit interactions for patterns and tactics, designers of interactive devices can better understand how to design interactions that work or to remedy interactions that fail. This book looks at the “smart,” “automatic,” and “interactive” devices that increasingly permeate our everyday lives—doors, switches, whiteboards—and provides a close reading of how we interact with them. These vignettes add to the growing body of research targeted at teasing out the factors at play in our interactions. I take a look at current research, which indicates that our reactions to interactions are social, even if the entities we are interacting with are not human. These research insights are applied to allow us to refine and improve interactive devices so that they work better in the context of our day-to-day lives. Finally this book looks to the future, and outlines considerations that need to be taken into account in prototyping and validating devices that employ implicit interaction. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / The Theory and Framework for Implicit Interaction / Opening the Door to Interaction / Light and Dark: Patterns in Interaction / Action and Reaction: The Interaction Design Factory/Driving into the Future, Together / Bibliography / Author Biography

People rely on implicit interaction in their everyday interactions with one another to exchange queries, offers, responses, and feedback without explicit communication. A look with the eyes, a wave of the hand, the lift of the door handle—small moves can do a lot to enable joint action with elegance and economy. This work puts forward a theory that these implicit patterns of interaction with one another drive our expectations of how we should interact with devices. I introduce the Implicit Interaction Framework as a tool to map out interaction trajectories, and we use these trajectories to better understand the interactions transpiring around us. By analyzing everyday implicit interactions for patterns and tactics, designers of interactive devices can better understand how to design interactions that work or to remedy interactions that fail. This book looks at the “smart,” “automatic,” and “interactive” devices that increasingly permeate our everyday lives—doors, switches, whiteboards—and provides a close reading of how we interact with them. These vignettes add to the growing body of research targeted at teasing out the factors at play in our interactions. I take a look at current research, which indicates that our reactions to interactions are social, even if the entities we are interacting with are not human. These research insights are applied to allow us to refine and improve interactive devices so that they work better in the context of our day-to-day lives. Finally this book looks to the future, and outlines considerations that need to be taken into account in prototyping and validating devices that employ implicit interaction.

Thoughts on Interaction Design, Second Edition, contemplates and contributes to the theory of Interaction Design by exploring the semantic connections that live between technology and form that are brought to life when someone uses a product. It defines Interaction Design in a way that emphasizes the intellectual and cultural facets of the discipline. This edition explores how changes in the economic climate, increased connectivity, and international adoption of technology affect designing for behavior and the nature of design itself. Ultimately, the text exists to provide a definition that encompasses the intellectual facets of the field, the conceptual underpinnings of interaction design as a legitimate human-centered field, and the particular methods used by practitioners in their day-to-day experiences. This text is recommended for practicing designers: interaction designers, industrial designers, UX practitioners, graphic designers, interface designers, and managers. Provides new and fresh insights on designing for behavior in a world of increased connectivity and mobility and how design education has evolved over the decades Maintains the informal-yet-informative voice that made the first edition so popular

Andreas Riener studies the influence of implicit interaction using vibro-tactile actuators as additional sensory channels for car-driver feedback and pressure sensor arrays for implicit information transmission from the driver toward the vehicle. The results of his experiments suggest the use of both vibro-tactile notifications and pressure sensor images to improve vehicle handling performance and to decrease the driver’s cognitive workload.

An investigation of interactivity, interfaces and their design, and the webs of complex interactions that result. We are surrounded by interactive devices, artifacts, and systems. The general assumption is that interactivity is good—that it is a positive feature associated with being modern, efficient, fast, flexible, and in control. Yet there is no very precise idea of what interaction is and what interactivity means. In this book, Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman investigate the elements of interaction and how they can be defined and measured. They focus on interaction with digital artifacts and systems but draw inspiration from the broader, everyday sense of the word. Viewing the topic from a design perspective, Janlert and Stolterman take as their starting point the interface, which is designed to implement the interaction. They explore how the interface has changed over time, from a surface with knobs and dials to clickable symbols to gestures to the absence of anything visible. Janlert and Stolterman examine properties and qualities of designed artifacts and systems, primarily those that are open for manipulation by designers, considering such topics as complexity, clutter, control, and the emergence of an expressive-impressive style of interaction. They argue that only when we understand the basic concepts and terms of interactivity and interaction will we be able to discuss seriously its possible futures.

In the everyday world, much of what we do as social beings is dictated by how we perceive and manage our interpersonal space. This is called proxemics. At its simplest, people naturally correlate physical distance to social distance. We believe that people’s expectations of proxemics can be exploited in interaction design to mediate their interactions with devices (phones, tablets, computers, appliances, large displays) contained within a small ubiquitous computing ecology. Just as people expect increasing engagement and intimacy as they approach others, so should they naturally expect increasing connectivity and interaction possibilities as they bring themselves and their devices in close proximity to one another. This is called Proxemic Interactions. This book concerns the design of proxemic interactions within such future proxemic-aware ecologies. It imagines a world of devices that have fine-grained knowledge of nearby people and other devices—how they move into range, their precise distance, their identity, and even their orientation—and how such knowledge can be exploited to design interaction techniques. The first part of this book concerns theory. After introducing proxemics, we operationalize proxemics for ubicomp interaction via the Proxemic Interactions framework that designers can use to mediate people’s interactions with digital devices. The framework, in part, identifies five key dimensions of proxemic measures (distance, orientation, movement, identity, and location) to consider when designing proxemic-aware ubicomp systems. The second part of this book applies this theory to practice via three case studies of proxemic-aware systems that react continuously to people’s and devices’ proxemic relationships. The case studies explore the application of proxemics in small-space ubicomp ecologies by considering first person-to-device, then device-to-device, and finally person-to-person and device-to-device proxemic relationships. We also offer a critical perspective on proxemic interactions in the form of “dark patterns,” where knowledge of proxemics may (and likely will) be easily exploited to the detriment of the user. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Videos / Figure Credits / Introduction / Part I / Ubicomp in Brief / Proxemic Interactions Theory / Operationalizing Proxemics for Ubicomp Interaction / Exploiting Proxemics to Address Challenges in Ubicomp Ecologies / Part II: Exploiting Proxemics in Ubicomp Ecologies / Person/Person-to-Device Proxemic Interactions / Device-to-Device Proxemic Interactions / Considering Person-to-Person and Device-to-Device Proxemics / Dark Patterns / Conclusion / References / Author Biographies