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Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action

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Abstract

Over the past decade, our group has approached interaction design from an industrial design point of view. In doing so, we focus on a branch of design called “formgiving”Footnote 1. Traditionally, formgiving has been concerned with such aspects of objects as form, colour, texture and material. In the context of interaction design, we have come to see formgiving as the way in which objects appeal to our senses and motor skills. In this paper, we first describe our approach to interaction design of electronic products. We start with how we have been first inspired and then disappointed by the Gibsonian perception movement [1], how we have come to see both appearance and actions as carriers of meaning, and how we see usability and aesthetics as inextricably linked. We then show a number of interaction concepts for consumer electronics with both our initial thinking and what we learnt from them. Finally, we discuss the relevance of all this for tangible interaction. We argue that, in addition to a data-centred view, it is also possible to take a perceptual-motor-centred view on tangible interaction. In this view, it is the rich opportunities for differentiation in appearance and action possibilities that make physical objects open up new avenues to meaning and aesthetics in interaction design.

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Notes

  1. Whilst formgiving is somewhat of a neologism in English, many other European languages do have a separate word for form-related design, including German (Gestaltung), Danish (formgivnin), Swedish (formgivning) and Dutch (vormgeving).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our former colleagues at the ID-Studiolab of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology—in particular, Caroline Hummels and Rob Luxen—for their contributions and the many valuable discussions. We gratefully acknowledge Prof. Dr. Don Bouwhuis of the Eindhoven J.F. Schouten School for User-System Interaction Research for providing the sponsorship for the colour illustrations in this article. We also gratefully acknowledge Aletta Stevens for the correction of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Industrial Design, Designed Intelligence Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, Hg 3.71, P.O. Box 513, 5600MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Tom Djajadiningrat, Stephan Wensveen, Joep Frens & Kees Overbeeke

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  1. Tom Djajadiningrat
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  2. Stephan Wensveen
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Correspondence to Tom Djajadiningrat.

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Djajadiningrat, T., Wensveen, S., Frens, J. et al. Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action. Pers Ubiquit Comput 8, 294–309 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0293-8

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