Natural interface exploration

Finding new and compelling approaches to interaction design for natural user interfaces, is challenging. The Natural Interface Exploration studio will offer participants the opportunity to explore interaction design for natural user interfaces based on physical substances that are used in everyday life. Studio organizers will present an overview of their methodology, providing examples of their experience [1, 2] and comparing it to other approaches. They will demonstrate how they analyze natural substances regarding the aspects of visualization and interaction and what kind of interfaces resulted [3, 4, 5] from these findings in initial workshops (see Figure 3 and 4). Following the demonstration, participants will form teams and collaboratively decide which substances or materials they would like to analyze. After examining and charting relevant aspects, the teams will chose a certain task to be solved with a new kind of interface. Example tasks will be provided by the studio organizers. The next step will be to decompose the tasks into required interaction and information needs. Finally participants will develop their own interface mock-up using stop motion or paper prototyping. Finally, studio organizers will facilitate a group critique session and offer closing thoughts on employing this methodology in one's creative TEI practice.