Embracing Ambiguity in Product Design

What is ambiguity? Among designers and engineers, ambiguity is frequent a topic that is avoided for sake of facilitating smooth user-product interactions and ease in product use. This avoidance is different than other fields, such as art, which embrace ambiguity frequently to evoke intriguing and engaging art experiences. The potentials of ambiguity in product design.and what it can bring to a users experience with objects, has rarely been explored. To our knowledge, Gaver, Beaver, and Benford (2003) are among the first to embrace ambiguity as a rich resource for designing human-computer interactions and to offer design strategies to enhance, create, or provoke ambiguity when designing information, context, and relationships. Alex Zakkas (2013) explored how ambiguity could induce creativity when people interacted with, and made use of, an object that is abundant in our lives (i.e., a twig). Product designers such as Philippe Starck and Naoto Fukasawa have also explored ambiguity in their work. Starck’s Juicy Salif, with its unconventional features for a lemon juicer, has dual-functionality envisioned by the designer: one being a lemon squeezer, the other being a conversation starter in the awkward moments between a newlywed and their in-laws. Fukasawa utilises ambiguity in the design of objects through creating interactions and experiences that are new and intriguing, yet familiar and comfortable to users. The MUJI CD player is an example of his use of ambiguity in the sense that the object resembles and is interacted with as kitchen wall fan yet provides a total new experience and interaction to how the user enjoys music via CD.