Abstract
As the digital world continues to become more mobile and wireless, a new challenge has arisen in this always connected landscape. That challenge has been created by the very thing that has helped to enable this nomadic experience – the loss of wires has resulted in a loss of what was once visually mapped connections between two or more digital objects which helped to semantically defined the relationship between ad hoc devices as well as user and devices. Current applications require the use of screen-based (explicit) interfaces to manage these connections but this research explores opportunities to leverage more implicit and tangible methods to creating these connections. This research and resulting user study (N=12) explored the use of gestures between primitive forms as a means of encoding paired relationships. The analysis of the resulting 108 patterns generated helped to isolate pairing attributes and an encoding protocol that could inform current and future tangible connections between digital devices.
Keywords
industrial design; interaction design; mobile computing, ad hoc
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.516
Citation
Germany, J. (2016) Ad Hoc Pairings: Semantic Relationships and Mobile Devices, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking - DRS International Conference 2016, 27 - 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.516
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Ad Hoc Pairings: Semantic Relationships and Mobile Devices
As the digital world continues to become more mobile and wireless, a new challenge has arisen in this always connected landscape. That challenge has been created by the very thing that has helped to enable this nomadic experience – the loss of wires has resulted in a loss of what was once visually mapped connections between two or more digital objects which helped to semantically defined the relationship between ad hoc devices as well as user and devices. Current applications require the use of screen-based (explicit) interfaces to manage these connections but this research explores opportunities to leverage more implicit and tangible methods to creating these connections. This research and resulting user study (N=12) explored the use of gestures between primitive forms as a means of encoding paired relationships. The analysis of the resulting 108 patterns generated helped to isolate pairing attributes and an encoding protocol that could inform current and future tangible connections between digital devices.