Meaningful materials: Exploring style in tangible interactions.

摘要

Tangible interactions is a rising area of human-computer interaction that seeks to move computing into the physical world and to leverage peoples' wealth of experience interacting with physical objects. Making computing more physical has introduced new hybrid digital-physical materials and digital-physical forms. Designing with these new materials raises a number of challenges, including the exploration of new computational possibilities as well as questions concerning how users experience these digital-physical hybrids once situated in their everyday lives.;In this dissertation, I examine emerging relationships between new materials, forms and meanings of resulting interactions. I do so by empirically researching and staging encounters between digital-physical artifacts, people, and ideas to explore their respective affordances, experiences, and possibilities. I take a critical approach, examining digital materials' aesthetic qualities; I use critical design to create experimental designs that employ materials in unusual ways. I presented these works in an exhibition, where I and colleagues documented participant perceptions of the designs. I also deployed several of my critical design objects into households for six months, exploring how people integrate the designs into their lives over time. My analysis of this data was informed by the concept of style, from aesthetic philosophy and critical/cultural theory, to focus on experiential aspects of tangible interactions that might get lost in more functionalist approaches.;I present results describing how materials play an important role in defining how a person perceives an interactive system and the experience of interacting with it over time. I show how functional elements contribute stylistic meanings, that these meanings frame the way that information is perceived, and that that framing shapes the ways in which artifacts became functionally integrated into participants' lives over time. These results have implications for the design of tangible interactions as well as for design researchers focused on materiality.