Hi, I'm Sara from the Media Interaction Lab and today I will present our Design
investigation of embroidered interactive elements on non wearable textile interfaces.
There has been a growing interest in subtle integrated human-machine
interfaces and smart textiles as one of the most natural and pleasant and
flexible ones have the potential to really be the interface of the future.
However, as is the case with all new technology we have to find a way to
somehow communicate this smartness to the users and that is rather how these
interfaces are designed becomes very important. And as we started getting more
into that and searching through what has already been done, we realized that even
the basic design rules and principles haven't yet been tested or proved on
textiles, so we had to go to the very beginning and today I will present what
we found out as the result of this process. We were not yet at a point where
we could keep any specific use cases in mind, so we decided to focus on non
wearables as findings and this area would be more general and could then
consequently, be applied to more than one specific application, wearables included
but also entertainment or automotive, fitness, health, medicine
anything really. While choosing and creating elements for our research we
kept the MAYA principle in mind. This stands for 'Most Advanced. Yet Acceptable.
and talks about the interaction jump between what the users are currently
used to and what these new technologies have to offer.
Basically, that this jump should not be too big. In essence, this states that if we go
too far from what people are currently used to, then they will most likely not
not accept it. So, employing this same logic, we looked into the interfaces
surrounding us today and we took the most commonly used interactive elements
which are buttons and sliders, and their corresponding interactions which is
pressing and sliding. Of course, there are already some examples of successful
textile interfaces already out there, some of which I'm showing here, but they
all seem to be kind of intuitively done. It bothered us a bit that there was a
lack of a systematic investigation that could aid the designers to more formally
evaluate and design such interfaces in practice. And so we present our main
contributions in this paper through this filtering process that I'm showing here
where each next stage gets more and more defined, and the assumptions more and
more become statements until we finalize them into the five design
recommendations. I will present them today and for us to be able to
understand how we got to them I will also talk about what we did in the user
study and what the results were from there. So the user study took place last
summer that was 2019 in Linz in Austria, various public places. It included 30
randomly selected participants, all with completely various occupations, and we
tested five different experiments, each corresponding to a statement we wanted
to either confirm or deny. So the first experiment was about recognising tactile
contrast. We tested a contrast of heights, shapes, and textures. There was always a
set of four elements, one was different and three were the same. We call them
defaults, these were circles, had no added height, and had a very bland polyester
texture. And then we asked our participants if, only through touch so
they were not allowed to look, can they recognize which element in this set is
different. And so in the case of height it showed that the contrast most
recognized was a difference of 1.6 millimeters or higher. This was
recognized by 29 participants out of 30, so almost everybody. In the contrasts of
shape the biggest contrast was edged among circular shapes. The best
recognized example for us was a triangle among circles by 22 participants out of
30. But we were a bit surprised that texture was actually not recognized so
well. So the contrast that was recognized the most was leather, but only
by 13 participants out of 30, so less than half, so not really a lot. But coming
from this our first design recommendation is: Use explicit contrast
to imply differentiation, and when I say explicit I mean for example in the
context of height this is at least 1.6 millimeters, so of course
everything lower than this is still a contrast but might not be explicit
enough for most people to be able to recognize it. And then the easiest
tactile contrast to recognize is height followed by shape and then texture.
Experiment number two was about smallest recognizable sizes. We
again ask the participants not to look at these samples, only to touch them, and
if they are able to recognize the shape that they're feeling can they name it
for us. Our assumption was that the border between what they can recognize
and what they cannot would be around 13 millimeters. This comes from Braille so
each Braille character is about 13 millimeters in size which is also
roughly the size of a fingertip. This proved to be the case in textiles as
well, so shapes in the size in the sizes of 13 millimeters or higher were
recognized by 29 participants out of 30, almost everybody. So we can conclude
that shapes should not be smaller than 6.5 millimeters and the
optimal shape size is 13 millimeters or bigger. Of course, if we do want the user
to be able to recognize what these shapes are. Experiment number three was
about convex and concave elements. Basically, we wanted to see if concave
elements can be perceived as interactive as well. This was the only experiment we
put in a specific use case or actually in two different specific use cases also
to see how perception between them would change and if it would. So this first one
was car window controls, how you would control these two elements to go up or
down or a volume controls, how you would increase or decrease volume. There showed
to be a slight difference in between the two, but our initial statement can
concave elements be perceived as that interactive did prove to be true, so
concave services are also perceived as interactive and the combination of a
convex and a concave element can be used for opposite commands and it usually
works really well. In experiment number four we were focusing on how influence
of shape can... how shapes can influence interaction. This was inspired by Don
Norman's theory of affordances, so he claims that objects should be designed
in a way that only one way of interacting with them is possible.
So here we had a few different examples, some were very clear, some were not very
clear. So the space bar there was an example that was intentionally made not
so clear, so it could be a slider it could be a space bar and people also
gave very different answers to what it could be. So it showed that we do have to
very much keep in mind of the previous or like the existing knowledge that the
users already have and what are some of the expectations they have while
interact acting with our interface. So in the in
the example here the circle, the triangle, and the square were all immediately
recognized as buttons, also grouped together by 28 participants,
mostly everybody. So the design recommendation number four you can use
the shape of an element to indicate required interaction, but as mentioned we
have to keep in mind what the expectations and the association from
the side of the user are, so these shapes have to be designed really unambiguously,
really clear on what this interaction should be. In the final experiment number
five we were testing the recognition of symbols. The question here was, again only
through touch, can people still be able to recognize, even if they are able to
sense only parts of the symbol, can they still kind of trigger what this is from
our visual memories. This kind of proved not to be the case, although the symbols
were picked specifically in a way that they would be recognized immediately for
most of us if we look at them, we are not so well at recognizing them only through
touch. So the one that was recognized the most was the star, still only by 15
participants this is half of everybody we tested. So the last design
recommendation, design all shapes as simple as possible, and here I would also
like to add that in the case of textiles maybe it would make sense to combine
this with also other parameters so for example different textures or different
heights, different sizes stuff like this. So this brings me to the last point
which is prototypes and applications, so to demonstrate our design
recommendations we challenged a group of nine designers and
developers to implement several textile prototypes. And they really immediately
started with hands-on prototyping, started combining these recommendations
into either single interaction elements or whole interfaces as we see here in
this little speaker example. They also started mixing these recommendations
together, they said they had no problem using sight as well and started adding
visual icons, also colors, they started thinking how connections to the boards
and the electronics could also be a part of the design. They also tried out some
textile icons. These were really interesting examples for us to see this
in practice. So in our paper, we presented a filtering process from the initial
design assumptions from the ideation phase then to the expert interviews, both
of these are described in more detail in the paper. And today we went through the
main insights from the user study and the five design recommendations for
textile interfaces. As our point from the beginning was to create some sort of a
guide on where to even start, what is the fallback, what are some
things that you can always base your design on and I think that we have
proved this to work quite well as inspiration, as some basic theory, as a
kind of a starting point. But in the end of course to take this and go on, go
further, run wild, go crazy and do new crazy stuff. Thank you very much.