Some thoughts on the recent papers

We have two different articles to aid us in this journey. On is about decisive constraints and is written by Michael Mose Biskjaera & Kim Halskova and the other one is written by Marco Spadafora, Victor Chahuneau, Nikolas Martelaro, David Sirkin and Wendy Ju. The article they wrote is about designing behaviour of interactive objects. I feel it is due time to mention something about them and chisel out the core insights to take into account now that a bit more serious design crafting is going to take place.

Starting of with Spadfora et al. The article got me thinking about aesthetics and how it can challenge efficiency. It is stated that many variables have to be thought through when designing an interaction between a user and and a object. The traditional way of driving the design process has been “efficiency” but just recently aesthetics has gotten more attention within the field of HCI. The focus is on how experiential behaviour and attributes are showing in the artifact.

As a way to actively and consistently designing behaviour the authors suggest to add an additional tool to the framework by integrating “a human stereotype of personality to the interactive object in order to design its behavior”. This is quiet an interesting approach, giving object a persona in some way that mimic human behaviour in order to enhance the interaction. I get the point of the examples but when I’m trying to apply the approach to our LED it becomes a bit challenging. It’s certainly desirable to make objects highly interactive and nuanced but it’s often easier said than done.

An interaction between a user and the artifact should be coupled in order for it to make sense. We can draw the conclusion that the input is equal to the output otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. If X amount of nuanced effort is inserted on the input one should expect the to get the same amount on the output. In this project the input is the user through the sensors and the output is the LED. While the photoresistor and piezo element can provide many ways of nuanced input, I’m not sure if the LED can match that level of nuance. As I posted earlier I want to give the LED some human-like emotions, the ability to be calm or scared.