Project Details
Projekt
Aesthetics of Performative Interaction for Pervasive Computing Environments in Public Spaces
Subject Area
Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems
Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425827565
Pervasive computing environments (PCEs) slowly become part of our day-to-day life, establishing connections between formerly isolated devices, such as smartphones, notebooks, TVs, lightning or even cars. The applications reach from smart home environments to public smart spaces, such as smart restaurants or automated security control at the airport. This ongoing trend calls for new interaction paradigms that consider the particular characteristics of PCEs and provide high quality interaction from an efficiency and an experience perspective. As outlined in the SPP 2199 call for proposals, a central challenge is the scalability of such interaction paradigms, and how to identify general characteristics that can be transferred across devices and domains, but at the same time consider technical and situational demands to provide a context-sensitive and fulfilling user experience (UX).The present project proposal addresses this with a focus on the emerging "aesthetics of interaction", i.e., interaction that "feels" good since it fits the current context and relevant psychological needs. We apply this approach in the reference scenario of public smart spaces, a scenario where sensible design with regards to experiential aspects and psychological needs seem especially relevant. Compared to other contexts, where interaction can be considered and evaluated from a single user's perspective, public contexts imply potential "spectators" and emerging social dynamics. A user experiences one's own interaction, but also may think about how others perceive this interaction and the impression one makes on others. Social acceptability thus seems crucially relevant for the experience and use of public interactive systems. In a set of systematic studies, we will identify psychological needs and specific requirements for positive experience and interaction in public contexts. Based on this, we will design, prototype and evaluate interaction concepts in three application scenarios (smart restaurant, airport, citizen's registration office), use these to develop generalized specifications of interaction paradigms for public spaces and generalizable evaluation strategies. Thereby, our research addresses questions from the SPP research area 1, namely, the development of design principles for efficient and meaningful scalable interaction paradigms, and research area 2, namely, the robust evaluation of these. The present approach is an important extension of previous work in the field of PCEs as well as HCI and interaction design in general. So far research on UX Experience and aesthetics of interaction neither focused on complex PCEs nor performative interaction. Also, prevalent interaction paradigms are often driven either by technology or modalities (e.g., touch, gestures, speech). The present proposal rather focuses on universal descriptive interaction attributes and connections to emerging experiential qualities, independent of the specific technology and modality.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
