Posts filed under ‘Statement’
Final concept
Tangible lightscapes is a research on interfaces mainly based on light and gestures – with an aim to develop a behaviours vocabulary for wireless networked devices.
The aim of my exploration is to design a vocabulary of light behaviours that shows people what their devices are doing. This vocabulary will be described in a map of light behaviours and gestures that can be applied to a wide range of contexts where devices (speakers, headphones, memory storage devices, cameras, laptops…) are communicating wirelessly. Today, connecting wireless devices is inconvenient: you have to go through interfaces that do not relate to the physical arrangement of the objects. It can also be difficult to understand which devices are connected and what they are communicating.
My “device language” gives a concrete representation of the intangible and invisible events that are taking place. It allows users to feel more in control by providing them with a direct interaction with the objects they are using.
The map has a three-dimensional representation in a set of light cubes.
The cube will show 2 different light feedbacks:
1. The Connection Light shows if the objects are connected and communicating with each other. The light intensity is proportional to the signal strength. The light blinks when the connection is lost. The connection light shows continuous communication.
2. The Control Light pulses if the networked objects are exchanging data. The sender and receiver are indicated through colour. The light turns solid when the transfer is complete and displays an error if something goes wrong. The control light shows discretecommunication.
The cubes also demonstrate the use of gesture in wireless devices. To make a connection, the user touches two cubes to each other.
The light cubes are tools for an ongoing research on people’s reaction to different light behaviours. The purpose is to discover the most intuitive match between the light’s activity and the meaning we want to deliver. The aim of my research is also to raise the attention given to light interfaces: light can be a core feedback tool, using peripheral attention to avoid information overload. Well designed device-device communication can lead to more intuitive user-device interaction.
Ssssh, my computer is in sleep mode!
A research on light and sound interfaces that evoke the behaviour of a living being and engage our peripheral attention.
PREMISE
Light and sound could be used in a more meaningful and intuitive way in many devices’ interface. Human brain perceives them as “natural” feedbacks, this propriety can be effectively exploited to convey an object status. The aim of my exploration is to find out if it possible to design an interface based on an anthropomorphic metaphor that uses light and sound as main tools to show the user what the devices are doing.
CONTEXT
In the near future, wireless communication will be spread everywhere. Without the physical cable connection it will be harder to guess which devices are talking to each other and what they are talking about. Already today we are often struggling to prevent our iPod from synchronising the whole content of our music folder, we wonder why the printer is not working when everything seems connected in the correct way, when we don’t receive any incoming signal from our wireless router we just reboot it, purely because we don’t know what else to do.
If we assume that, within 5 years, most of the devices that we use on daily basis will communicate to each other without any physical connection, the situation could become even more complicated.
Products like mobile phones, mp3 readers, earphones, printers, laptops, cameras, game platforms etc will share connection (Bluetooth, Xbee, WiFi), functionalities (I’ll probably write my sms using a wireless keyboard that I’ve found around) and contents (I’ll share my playlist with the other 100 iPod users that are on my train now) more and more.
How will they communicate their status? Maybe it will be easier to understand their mutual interaction if we design an interface that shows us their behaviour in an intuitive way.
This “device language” will give a concrete representation of the intangible and invisible events that are taking place. A well designed device/device communication will lead to a more “natural” device/user interaction.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
I would like to design a tangible communication protocol between networked objects that share data, connection, functionalities etc.
Light and sound will be used in the interface to make visible the devices’ behaviour as if they were living beings. The aim is to show the devices’ intangible actions and make them intuitively recognisable stretching light and sound emotive communication qualities.
How might we use light and sound to design interfaces that show in a “natural” way the behaviour of wireless networked devices?
How might we use light and sound to make visible the intangible processes that are happening inside our devices?
Devices should be perceived as calmer, in fact if the user understand what the object is doing, he also feels more in control of it. Moreover users feel more power over their tools if they can have a direct/physical interaction with them.
How might we design a non lingual /gestural interface that amplify the trust we put in a device?
Today our environment is getting polluted and saturated with many feedbacks that keep our central attention continuously focus, this situation leads to a high level of stress and information overload.
How might we engage more our peripheral attention to create a calmer relationship with our devices?
Topic/domain
Alhazen’s illustration about human vision. Alhazen (965 in Basra – c. 1039 in Cairo) made significant contributions to the principles of optics.
80% of all sensory perceptions are optic and need light as an information medium.
The eye is always consciously or unconsciously monitoring the environment: human attention is captured by the brightest items in the visual field, by moving objects, by unforeseen elements and by everything potentially dangerous. For these reasons light can be seen as a universal language.
Beyond any cultural and linguistic barrier, human beings are instinctively attracted by light, this attitude can be used to convey information in a strategic way. It is possible to take advantage of these proprieties using light as a meaningful medium to guide and help users to solve complex issues, limiting the information overload given by many traditional interfaces.
At this point the aim of my research is therefore to understand how to create a basic light behaviour grammar to design a non verbal interface that can be understood in a more intuitive way.
Within the end of the project I would like to investigate if it is possible to design an interface that uses mainly light, sound, haptic perception, heat, storytelling etc as tools to express the behaviour of the device.
In this way I would like to understand which are the prerequisites to design “calm devices”, that requires just our peripheral attention to work correctly.
Light as a meaningful medium
Light can be an effective feedback and therefore express behaviours trough:
- COLOURS
- SPEED OF CHANGES (RATE): frequency, duration, cycles, syncronicity, sequence of a pattern
- INTENSITY/BRIGHTNESS: fading, pulsing, blinking
- SHAPE: using many LEDs, low definition screen
- CULTURAL REFERENCES: red/stop, green/go….
A recogniseble pattern tells us something: the message is intentional and, in relation with the pace/colour, this is the “state” of the content. If there is no pattern maybe there is no content or something is wrong.
INFORMATION = DISPOSITION
Natural and predictable interaction
The best designs are those that “dissolve into behaviour”.
Naoto Fukasawa
The best, most natural designs, then, are those that match the behaviour of the system to the gesture humans might already do to enable that behaviour.
Dan Saffer
Set the problem: set up the dialogue!
Find out a new metaphor to design a non verbal interface that can be understood in a more intuitive way.
Hypothesis: use light, sound, haptic perception, heat, storytelling… not just as events that return feedbacks but as tools to express a behavioural metaphor
CIID final project initial statement
My research has always been motivated by an interest in how technology represents itself and its functioning to human users, to avoid being a “black box”. Mechanical devices could still be intuitively understood in their working, just by watching the cogs turn; the designers of digital devices create metaphors to represent their functioning. This has usually been done by creating interfaces based on the analogy between digital and mechanical devices. I am very fascinated by the idea of basing an interface’s design on another analogy: the one between a device’s functioning and the behaviour of a conscious being. I would like to experiment if light could be a good tool to induce such analogy.
I am really inspired by Valentino Braitenberg’s research on how very simple automated agents are interpreted by human observers as conscious beings with a behaviour, motives and thoughts. If a user could be led to consider in this way a digital device, their interaction with it may be more intuitive and straightforward than it sometimes is. This may then be a way of humanizing technology and limit information overload.
This is the sort of interface I would like my research to focus on.
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I want my final project to bring to a further step my personal research in the use of light as a means of humanizing technology and empowering human/machine interaction. In my graduation thesis I studied how light can be used as a tool to communicate and react to a given environment, now I would like to understand if I can use it as a tool to design an intuitive interface to interact with people.
I want my final project to represent a starting point for a wider-scoped research to be carried in the future within academic institutions, r&d labs or design companies.
