Workshop outcome

Workshop overview report

The aim of the workshop on touch affordances held at INTERACT2009 was to bring together people who are in any way involved in the area of touch interaction. Our motivation for this workshop all started from the observation that touch interactions with digital systems are hard to communicate to the person using it. (For a general description of the workshop click here, the general workshop setup here.) While on the one hand touch-based interactions require very simple actions, on the other hand, touch-based interfaces often are unfamiliar to users and therefore do not invite them to perform the correct actions. Findings of previous studies suggest that unfamiliarity with touch-related interfaces can indeed result in difficulties with regard to interaction (e.g. Belt, Greenblatt, Häkkilä & Mäkelä, 2006; Peltonen, Kurvinen, Salovaara, et al., 2008). This topic leads to the question of how to design simple yet intuitive touch interfaces.

During a one day workshop we tried to get a discussion going in this field by immersing people in a creative environment. The day consisted of four major parts;

i. introductions

ii. plenary discussion on the main challenges related to touch interaction

iii. prototype creation

iv. prototype testing, evaluation & roundup

In total 11 people participated in the workshop.

Karin Slegers, Centre for User Experience Research - K.U.Leuven
Dries De Roeck, Centre for User Experience Research - K.U.Leuven
Marc Godon, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs
Dhaval Vyas, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente
Kelvin Cheng, NICTA & HxI Initiative
Rui Nóbrega, CITI, Departamento de Informática, University of Lisbon
Johannes Schöning, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken
Nitesh Goyal, RWTH, Aachen University
Elise van den Hoven, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology
Jo Hare, PDR, The University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC)
Stanislaw Zabramski, Uppsala University

Unfortunately one of the organizers, Timo Arnall, had to cancel his participation due to illness.

Although we tried to limit the scope to touch affordances, discussions on a much higher level emerged quite quickly. Since the workshop participants came from various backgrounds, getting to understand what we mean with “touch interactions” was a first challenge. As a general observation, the interpretation of the word “touch” is not the same for everyone. The interpretation differences were very small, however the nuances truly made the difference. For instance, talking about “touch” in relation to a tangible game is not entirely the same as when talking about a game on a multitouch tabletop. The tangible game involves 3D ‘real world’ objects, the tabletop reduces this to 2D representations of the real world.

One thing all participants did agree on is that a touch-related interface shares the concept of “Physicality”. It still remains a hazy term, but seems to capture the field the discussion was about in a better way than the term “Touch”. Although the discussion was far from finished when we had to end it, we concluded on 4 challenges the field we tried to describe is facing in the coming years;
Bring physicality in collaboration
- Collaboration was a theme that emerged directly out of the paper contributions from the participants. This seemed like a good starting theme in relation to touch interactions.
Bring physicality to the people (make DIY simpler)
- Everyday people should get easier access to the tools in order to fully participate in the world of digital physicality.
Match design & technology
At the moment, technology enabling touch interactions and the interaction design itself is not evolving parallel. Both design and technology will need to adapt to each other in order to be part of everyday life.
Communicating touch (what/where/how)
- This gets back to the initial ‘affordance’ goal we envisioned: Communicating to the users where the interface is, what it is for and how they can interact with it. still remains a challenge.

Keeping this discussion in mind, the group was split up in 3 smaller groups. Each of these got to pick an extreme persona and a context. The goal of the first part exercise was to first think about each persona’s characteristics in each context and how the persona could use a touch-based interaction in that context. During the second phase of the exercise, these concepts were prototyped using provided creative materials. The assignment was to design the prototypes in such a way that the users would immediately know what the prototype is, what it could be used for and how it should be operated. The prototypes that were created are listed below per group:

i. James Bond & Outdoor

Several prototypes were created. A common denominator was some kind of guidance system for James Bond to find subjects. By making use of haptics and touch systems the prototypes could be used in an outdoor setting without anyone noticing.

Tactile fabric : built in touch-zones in the pockets of pants could allow for hidden remote control
‘pulling device’ : instead of using vibrations a device would simulate the sense of pulling. This could be used to guide people to a certain target or geographical location.
drones : drones could be launched into the air, containing various sensors. When wearing special glasses you can see what the drones see and experience their information sensed.

ii. Luigi & Public Transportation

This prototype consisted of a tangible game world in which Luigi (the game character) had to use a variety of transportation systems in order to reach the end of the world. The player could control Luigi by moving his fingers in a walking motion. To simulate the steps Luigi could take the player’s fingers were held together at a specific distance. Each transportation system had its own way to initiate it and interact with it. By using various materials the design team experimented to communicate these interactions to the person controlling Luigi. The most interesting thing was the way in which material choice influenced the way interactions were understood;

- Using sponge material for jumping was understood very well

- A rock was placed on a spring; the idea was that by removing the rock the game character would skip through a difficult part of the world. However the rock was interpreted as a danger.

iii. Starving child & School

The third prototype was a scaled model of a ‘learning zone’ in which children who do not have direct access to food can learn how to use the resources of their land in order to feed themselves and their families. Much like the second scenario, the choice of materials was again important to elicit the expected interactions. An interesting learning from this prototype was the impact of using archetypical shapes (i.e. shapes that everyone recognises). For instance, a vertical cylinder with bars sticking out of it was easily interpreted as something that could be rotated. This hints that designing with archetypes might be a useful direction in relation to designing for touch interactions.

Overall conclusion

During the workshop, the organizers captured all discussions via a live Twitter stream. After the prototyping session a wordcloud was created of all the Tweets, facilitating the final discussion on the outcome of the workshop. From the wordcloud, it became clear that the words touch, design, interaction, people and physicality jumped out. Although the participants initially interpreted “touch” in slightly different ways, several commonalities were found in each other’s research. Obviously many unanswered questions remain, but the construction foundations of a bridge between various sub-disciplines relating to “touch” have been started.