Designing the Expressive Point Lights to Enhance User's Situated Awareness of Smart Systems

Digital devices and intelligent systems are becoming popular in the world. However, they seldom provide sufficient communications to help users have situated awareness of the surrounding status. In this study, we explored the expressiveness designs with the point lights embedded on ubiquitous devices. Extending from related works, we demonstrated how could designers develop different light patterns and compose them with performative arrangements to convey informative clues about what is happening within the system. This could increase the user's situated awareness and guide them to decide how to respond without overburdening.