Welcome to this presentation on affordances of shape changing interfaces, an information
perspective.
On transformability and movement.
This work is done together with my co-authors Majken Kirkegaard Rasmussen and and my name
is Johan Trettvik.
Let’s begin this with a small exercise, Imagine you are at the cinema and need to
wash your hands, You go to the bathroom and see this strange water faucet.
As you approach the sink the faucet suddenly springs to life and snakes out towards your
hands.
What do you see, feel and expect in this situation?
What is the experience here?
Now you let the water faucet splash water on your hands, or so it seems at least, and
as you reach for the soap, the faucet curls up and await your hands.
Things coming to life, is a mysterious experience for most of us.
It raises questions about the things animacy and confronts our usual experience of the
world.
Now you are in a museum and are getting tired.
You need to sit down and look around for a bench.
You find one, but guests are already sitting there.
No matter you sit down on the edge to rest your weary legs, keeping your social distance.
As you sit down, the seat suddenly begins to incline and you slide slowly towards the
middle.
You look at the other bench-guest and see they also slide towards the middle.
What is happening here?
And how would you feel here?
Being acted on by things that are “supposed” to be still is a strange, and for some, disturbing
experience.
How could you have perceived that this bench would be one that tried to bring you together
with others?
That this was a “social bench” that did not accept your understanding or need for
personal space?
The world can be a mysterious place, and sometimes the designer wants the designed to be mysterious
but all too often this is unintentional and leads to the users of the design to become
confused or frustrated.
The field of shape changing places these concerns to the forefront, and it also pushes the usual
understanding of affordances outside its normal “comfort zone” – at least as it has
typically been used in design and HCI.
Affordances are often used as a core concept in HCI in general and SCI in particular.
SCIs offer something unique and affordances is a useful term for articulating the qualities
of these new interfaces It is often treated as a stand-alone-concept
leaving the researcher unsatisfied with its explanatory power, thus seemingly leading
to a need for expanding the concept with new qualifiers to articulate the particular kinds
of affordances of SCIs.
This has unfortunately led to a struggle with an overconceptualisation around the core concept
of affordances where the same expansion of the concept means different things and different
expansions mean the same.
In particular the notion of dynamic affordances has gained traction in the field of shape-changing
interfaces But we find that there are at least three
problems in relation to the current use of the term:
First, Most research on dynamic affordances does not provide a clear definition of dynamic
affordances, nor discuss how dynamic affordances are different from existing definitions of
affordances
Second, the notion typically draws upon a rather narrow conceptualization of affordances
and most often conceptually conflates communication, information, and affordance
Finally, Dynamic affordances is mainly as an analytic concept and it is not clear how
it can inform design So in this paper we ask: Is there really a
for need for inventing new concepts?
And Does shape-change really challenge Gibson’s notion of Affordances?
The short answer is NO!!
The core proposition of the paper is that the emergence of SCIs does not call for additional
qualifiers when it comes to affordances, but rather an enriched conceptualization which
can be found through re-visiting Gibson.
We do not only need the tip of the iceberg, we need the whole iceberg.
Secondly, we illustrate how SCIs often deploy certain design strategies to provide information
regarding affordances of SCIs.
In this way we illustrate how an elaborate theoretical foundation for affordances of
SCI can inform the design of future SCIs.
We, as humans and living animate beings, are active perceivers of our environment, perceptually
learning about the things that are important for us.
This learning is only possible by picking up information in the environment.
And this information specifies what we can do with the world, that is – it specifies
its affordances.
To get under the hood of this concept of information we use Gibson’s distinction between animate
and in-animate objects.
This leads to a distinction between information of the possible transformability of an object,
fx moving it around in space, turning it, bending it, smashing it and other kinds of
behavior ON the object.
AND the movement of the object as it fx approaches us, turns around, leaves, wobble, lurches,
bends or rolls.
Information about behavior that specifies the character or animacy of the object (or
organism).
Based on this understanding of affordances, we re-visit scholarly SCIs to identify how
they make use of different strategies to provide information that specifies their ability to
change shape in terms of both transformability and movement.
Regarding transformability - we can see how they make use of different strategies for
providing information that specify the ability to transform and we outline four different
strategies as they are found in scholarly SCIs; 1) structure, 2) material, 3) actuation
mechanisms, and 4) form.
Considering the example of LineForm, we illustrate through speculative re-designs how the form
can be used to provide information regarding its ability to transform its shape, in contrast
with the top-right picture of the covered LineFORM.
From the scholarly SCI examples, we also see how designers often take advantage of common,
well-known objects and how we have learnt to pick-up a range of different types of information
from everyday objects specifying that they can transform shape in different ways.
Here we wee see examples of the use of structure and material as strategies for speciying information
regarding transformability
Regarding Movement, We also suggest explanations to why objects are perceived in special ways.
An animate object is more unpredictable than an inanimate one.
Self initiated movement often specifies a certain level of agency or sentiency can also
provide information about special characteristics of a thing which is not found in more inert
objects.
As an example, The Ripple thermostat uses self-initiated movement as well as the trajectory
of its movement in and out to to specify the animacy of the object.
As SCIs emerge as a new type of interface, the concept of affordance has attracted attention
as a gateway to conceptualize the possibilities for action.
This paper suggests that including Gibson’s wider conception of affordances, can serve
to alleviate the current conceptual conflation surrounding the term in SCI, as can be seen
from the plethora of qualifiers added to the term affordances, and the general lack of
definitions and theoretical foundations.
Designing SCIs from the perspective of affordances, implies focusing on how we perceive meaning
as affordances, and what we attend to when learning about them.
In this paper, we suggest that the concept of information is vital in understanding affordances
and in designing for them, in the sense that we need to design for information pick-up
regarding in particular SCIs ability to transform its shape and to move more or less autonomously.
Based on this wider conceptualization, we re-visit scholarly SCIs, and map out different
strategies that designers can deploy when designing for information pick-up.
Finally, based on scholarly SCI research prototypes, we illustrate how we can draw upon well-known
phenomena in everyday objects, when designing for future shape-changing interfaces.
We consider the ongoing discourse as a fruitful discussion regarding how affordances can become
an operational and practical concept driving further design and research in SCIs in particular
and design and HCI more generally.