Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance. It may seem incredible to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions. How could these static, boring objects change the way you feel and act towards others? Well, fortunately there is a wealth of new research to back up these bizarre claims. While uncovering this research, I couldn’t help but think about how the design of everything from consumer products to education, could be transformed by the notion of embodied cognition. And so I dove into the ever-overlapping worlds of design and cognitive science once more, this time to unearth more about what it could mean to design with embodied cognition in mind, at the very least subconsciously.

The Research

Yale University’s John Bargh is among a small but international group leading the charge to understand embodied cognition and its behavioral priming capabilities. Bargh recently co-authored a paperfor the journal Science documenting the dramatic power of the sense of touch, when paired with the brain’s abilities to affect how the world is viewed. Bargh’s team found over a series of two studies that subjects:

• who read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to characterize it as adversarial if they had first handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces, compared to smooth ones.
• sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were less willing to compromise in price negotiations than people who sat in soft, comfortable chairs.
• judge other people to be more generous and caring after they had briefly held a warm cup of coffee, rather than a cold drink.
• holding a heavy clipboard while interviewing job applicants took their work more seriously than their interviewing counterparts holding light clipboards.

Considering that none of the subjects in any of the experiments were told they would be tested on how they react to their physical environment, it’s all the more amazing that while their conscious focus was on a very specific task, their subconscious was deciding how they should feel towards literally everything around them, based on literally everything they were interacting with at a given moment, including the jigsaw puzzle pieces, the chairs, the cup of coffee, and the clipboards. An independent Dutch study titled “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” dives even deeper into the notion of physical characteristics affecting abstract psychological concepts. Focusing on one concept, weight, the study found that people deal with the abstract concept of weight in an analogue way to how they deal with the physical characteristic of weight; they invest more effort. The study showed that weight, the abstract conceptleads to:

• greater elaboration of thought
• greater polarization between judgments of strong versus weak arguments
• greater confidence in one’s opinion

while weight, the physical characteristic, as in physical objects:

• require higher energetic costs to move or pick up
• have a greater impact on people’s bodies
• require more effort, in terms of physical strength and cognitive planning
• cause people carrying weight to judge distances to be greater and hills to be steeper (than those who do not carry the weight or who carry less weight)

A Linguistic Perspective

As groundbreaking (and awesome!) as this research is, it’s worth providing a bit of background in similar thinking, albeit purely linguistic as opposed to physical. In 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a seminal work that suggests that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding of the world around us:

“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.”

Lakoff and Johnson proposed a new recognition of how profoundly metaphors not only shape our view of life in the present but set up the expectations that determine what life well be for us in the future. While they may have limited their research to the notions of using physical embodiments as metaphorical communication tools, Lackoff and Johnson’s link to current day embodied cognition research is undeniable. In fact, the Dutch study notes that weight is a metaphor for importance in many languages, including English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese, and that people:

• ‘weigh’ the value of different options before making a decision
• ‘add weight’ to place emphasis on important ideas
• judge opinions as ‘carrying weight’ if the source is considered knowledgeable or influential

Lakoff and Johnson discovered that we use embodied metaphors, such as weight, to tie abstract concepts and emotions to physical objects and environments, they just didn’t realize that these very same physical objects and environments are actually driving human perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Lawrence Williams, who helped design the warm coffee cup experiment with John Bargh says “it’s no coincidence that we use the same word — warmth — to describe both a physical and an emotional experience. Somewhere in the brain, those two sensations are linked,” he says. Williams and the Dutch study both allude to the idea that embodied cognition could be developed early on in life – either starting in the womb (where the child would find love, comfort, and physical warmth), or at least in early childhood development.

A McLuhan Perspective

The notion of a designed thing performing a kind of hypnosis on its user would be nothing new to Marshall McLuhan, writer of the ever poignant if too often quoted “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Author of the 1964 ground-breaking manifesto, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan was a purveyor of radical media theory such as the subliminal effects of what he refers to as “the medium”. Advocating that by by too narrowly focusing on the content, we are blinded to the actual character of “the medium” including its psychic and social effects. Bringing this into the realm of designing with embodied cognition in mind, take the electric light bulb as a classically referenced example. Upon initial consideration, the light bulb might be thought of as a product as opposed to a medium, however McLuhan would propose that the light bulb provides light, which greatly affects the perceptions and emotions of the people for whom the light bulb provides the light. Therefore, McLuhan gives us a new lens through which to look at designed products and interactions, not as cold, static things that we act onto, but as active participants in our perceptual and emotional world.

An Anatomical Perspective

There is no denying the volatility of McLuhan’s theories, but some neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers, emblazoned with the new research on embodied cognition, are giving him a run for his bold money. These thought leaders claim that “human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body.” If we didn’t walk with two legs, grasp with opposable thumbs, or communicate with modern language, they argue, we would understand these concepts in completely different ways. Put simply, the experience of being human, of having a body, specifically our own body, is intimately paired with our intelligence. And since the experience of having a body is inherently tied to the objects and environmental factors the body uses to interact with the world, I would assert that the current suite of things and interactions available to people is really what frames the current state of human thinking.

Montessori Spindle Box — combining abstract concepts with embodied ones

Embodying Cognition

I think what makes embodied cognition so fascinating is how it deals with social responses to environmental factors. The fact that those people holding warm coffee cups perceived other people to be more generous and caring, and those people sitting in soft chairs were more willing to compromise makes me think three very interesting thoughts: that we never think in a vacuum, that we never, ever, stop thinking, and that designers, some of whom may have considered metaphor as a tool to deliver an experience that users can relate to another positive experience, now have so much more to consider when designing. As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you. Industrial and interaction designers are perhaps more aware than most, of how many unpleasant objects exist in the world, waiting to be held or touched, poised to take over our emotions and make us judge people. Granted, in order to keep costs down and ensure that the masses can afford to buy new things, high design and quality materials are often overlooked or kicked by the wayside. But high design is not what we’re talking about here. A warm coffee mug is not better designed than a cold one; same goes for the heavier clipboard – the opposite may be true in that case, in fact. So how can the design process be informed by the notion of embodied cognition? Is it possible to design better things through a deep understanding of the human mind’s disposition for connecting abstract emotional concepts with concrete physical things? For starters, we know that the sense of touch is an essential aspect of being human – physical concepts such as roughness, hardness, warmth, and weight being amongst the first that infants develop. And if we cross reference that with the design process, which often deals with materials selection, we can start to imagine how designers could use embodied cognition as a tool, even helping young children and adults develop abstract concepts about people and relationships. At the very least, I think it’s worth experimenting to see if designing products and interactions for specific embodied cognition applications can work. Wouldn’t it be cool if, while designing a new thing, we could test for embodied cognition affects in potential users? Want to know if your new laptop inspires greater confidence (with the opposite sex, let’s say) in potential owners? Slip it into one of John Bargh’s studies, give half the test group your new computer and the other half the competition’s machine, have them chat online with a blind date and collect data. Imagine what you could learn about users’ reactions to the physical characteristics of the laptop – the feeling of the keyboard, the weight of the metal body, the glossiness of the screen, the auditory feedback when you click. Testing for these things using embodied cognition experiments could become a new product development research standard. But what if using embodied cognition as a tool in the design process could extend beyond testing for emotional and behavioral responses to new products and services? What if designers could create interactions and products that enhance the ability to learn and memorize? Well, it turns out this may be possible. New embodied cognition research, aimed at identifying the value of physicality in education revealed that:

• children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking.
• stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving.
• subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

Imagine using embodied cognition principles to transform education, shifting the focus from static reading, writing, and reciting to movement and simulation. Imagine if rehabilitative medicine specialists could use their understanding of their patients’ embodied cognitive abilities to help them recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. This research proves that designers can use a knowledge of embodied cognition to re-investigate and invent new, more successful physical tools and interactions for a variety of applications. Designers could perhaps think beyond traditional ergonomics in the sense that we design things that fit the human form, that feel good to hold, to consider “cognitive ergonomics”, designing things that fit the human mind, that feel good to think about, or that make us think “nice” thoughts. Armed with a greater understanding for human inclination to embody emotion with physical metaphor and the ability of physical things to affect human perception and emotion, designers could take on the challenge of cognitive ergonomics. To figure out how to design for the mind, not just the body. After all, as Bargh points out, “The old concepts of mind-body dualism are turning out not to be true at all”. Altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors. Our brains are intrinsically linked to our bodies and the relationship is an organic one. We think with our bodies and our brains. So let’s design things that embrace that link, that feel good to think about, that take the cognitive rough edges off, hone them down, and smooth them out. Let’s redesign our physical world with embodied cognition in mind.

Additional References:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy NPR: Study Links Warm Hands and Warm Heart Boston Globe’s Report on Embodied Learning Touch and Gender Stereotypes (Psych Central) —— Coffee image CC by cogdog, Montessori Spindle Box CC  by 54mama,

After a day of talks and a night (or even two, depending on when you got in) of parties, day 2 of Interactions 11 eased up the pace a bit. After a morning of presentations, attendees were let loose in Boulder with afternoon activities ranging from designing with junk to tea tasting.

This daily report wouldn’t have been possible without the writing skills (and energy) of Pieter Jongerius, Anna Offermans, and Patrick Sanwikarja .

Opening Keynote — Richard Buchanan

Richard Buchanan stripped it back — no slides, no holds barred, even a riff on clothes and not wearing them (more on that later) — in a pointed talk on interaction design that deftly interweaved his ideas with those from earlier talks .

First up, he addressed a recurring theme of being concerned about design not having a subject. According to him, this is a good thing. “Design has no subject matter – that’s what make this a powerful discipline. We MAKE our subject matter.” There had also been talk of the definition of interaction design, and in this light he gave his:

Interaction is how people relate to other people through the mediating influence of products — with products being either physical or digital.

Starting with “the triangle of doom” of product attributes (Lisa Strauss’s “useful, usable, desirable”, or what he calls “Logos, ethos, pathos”), he reminded us that if we can’t identify with  a product, it’ll not come into our lives, and therefore as a designer we need to balance all these attributes (e.g. it’s more important for a fireman’s suit to be usable, but for a ball gown to be desirable).

Buchanan’s core tenet is that there are four orders of design.

1. Mass communication
2. Mass industrialisation
3. Actions (the realm of interaction — or inter-action — design)
4. Environments (participation, the natural counterpart of actions)

Mass communication and industrialisation (the 1st and 2nd order of design) are natural counterparts, and have been around for nearly a century. However, the 3rd order of design is action (e.g. a chair as a site of activity). To understand action is to take into account greater needs such as content strategy and business goals (the Mayo Clinic is a great example).

But this isn’t enough. We need to consider action’s natural counterpart and the 4th order of design: environments (such fellow speaker Erik Hershman’s Ushahidi project).

So, what type of designer do you want to be: thing-thing, person-person, person-environment, participatory designer?

Taking up on the previous day’s discussion on material and principles, Buchanan suggests that “the material of interaction design is the purposes and values of people we serve, which come to us as clay.” Furthermore, “the principle behind interaction design — no, all design — is human dignity”. We should aim for justice.

If one action came out of Buchanan’s talk, it was to know your history: Erving Goffman and his ‘inception-development-fulfilment’ cycle; John Dewey’s principles of inauguration, interaction, leave-taking, everything about George Nelson (his most brutal comment of the audience “You don’t know much about the history of design or philosophy, do you?”). He pointed out that design industry is usually 25-30 years behind academia (e.g. Dewey’s work was conducted in the 1930s but only taken up by the New Bauhaus in the 1960s). While his references may have been nothing new to his former CMU students, to those not familiar with their works (apparently the majority of the audience) it was a valuable lesson. As someone tweeted: Vintage UX Bookclub, anyone?

Macro vs. Micro — Kalani Kordus & Karl Adam

Kalani and Karl gave a duo presentation about the power of small teams. Before starting their current company Smudgeproof, both worked at Yahoo on the Messenger app for iPhone. Now, they design and develop mobile apps (including the Interaction 11 official conference app). In their talk, they compared designing and developing within a large organisation and as a small startup. At Yahoo, there were lots of people and many departments involved: Design, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Product managers, Marketing managers. Now at Smudgeproof, it’s just the two of them: a designer and a developer, doing everything from research to testing and marketing.

Traditional processes (many sequential design and development phases) don’t work. At the milestones, or ‘traffic lights’ as they called it, the team often has to go back to previous phases, because stakeholders can’t agree on signoffs. In other words: lots of red lights. It is much better to have ‘roundabouts’, so they can take an exit at any moment: they can jump from any part of the process to another, in any particular order. For example, from an idea to trying it out in code, or from applying research insights directly into marketing. Design and engineering are like yin and yang. One can’t do without the other, because if it never gets built, it’s just an idea.

So now, at Smudgeproof, they have a completely different, trimmed down process, which basically consists of getting all ideas and sketches on a whiteboard (never on paper) for all to see, making very little documentation, and creating full fidelity visual mockups, that are then build. How they work is based on three principles:

• Wear more hats. They are able to stay small because each plays many roles. Not only interaction, but also visual design. Not only development but also testing.
• Fewer formalities. No red lights. Get to know the people you’re working with and trust them.
• Be like water. It can be very powerful and if something is in the way, water can go around it. Keep flowing.

The bottom line: two people can do the same as many large departments, or at least much faster. At Yahoo, a very simple bug would take days before it got fixed, due to many stakeholders and formalities. At Smudgeproof, it gets fixed in a minute, because it’s only one line of code. To me, this sounds a lot like Agile. This is easy to organize when you are your own company, but how can this approach be implemented in large organizations, such as Yahoo? Should product managers be eliminated altogether? Should design departments be cut in half? Unfortunately Kalani and Karl didn’t really touch on this.

Design for Evil: Ethical Design — Kaleem Khan

One of the most sobering, yet relevant talks of the day was given by Kaleem Khan. During his lightning talk he addressed the importance of ethics in our field. According to Kaleem we as designers don’t think enough about the impact of design. He states that we should be conscious about the artefacts we design, the clients we work for and the way we design, because design isn’t something that just stands on its own, it affects everything, including the future. Basically, if we are aware that a client (or their products) hurt people in any way, we should think twice before doing work for them.

Kaleem took a very direct and holistic approach to ethics.  However, by showing only high impact examples  — the fifteen people that committed suicide at Foxconn (the Chinese company manufacturing the iPhone), how working for a gambling agency is bad —I believe he lost some of the power of the point he was trying to make. The real issue around ethics is that they are very personal and never black and white: where one person might  get angry and step away from a client, another may find reasons for staying involved. In order to really understand ethics and how we should deal with it we must start at a different level, one that Buchanan hit on the head: human dignity.

Introducing IA, ID and UX into New Media Pedagogy, Journalism and Content Publishing — Stephen Johnson

The publishing industry is changing. According to Steven Johnson, graduating journalists have to be able to write, edit, shoot, design, code, publish, edit, do social media, and in doing so, become a new online-savvy type of journalist. Steven teaches his students at CSU the principles of IA, ID and UX, so that they will have a better understanding of the new media and efficiently create content for those media.

He recommends the classic UX readings, tells about the tools we use and makes his students create wireframes of existing webpages, in order to get a great understanding of concepts and processes that most new media professionals now take for granted. The fact that he made his students create wireframes with lorem ipsum instead of using real content was questioned by some people in the audience. As content is becoming more and more important in UX design, it felt strange that a content creating company would not use content in its designs. Steven answered that in some cases it is important to be more abstract, in order not to distract the attention from the things which are important at that moment.

In an attempt to prove that the power of content sometimes pushes towards solutions that meet scepticism with interaction designers, Steven went on to show some nice examples of very long home pages of news sites: the Norwegian VG Nett had no less than a 12,500 pixel deep homepage; The Huffington Post, 10,000 pixels; The New York Times ‘only’ 3,700. Yet all of these sites are very successful and attract large crowds.
Back in 1999, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times used print fonts in the headers of their articles to try to keep fidelity with the printed version and the Los Angeles Times still tries to keep up with the traditional newspaper by only using rollover colors for links instead of blue underline text.

To conclude, Steven refers to the story of the blind men and an elephant where a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. The interaction designer should be the one to see it is an elephant.

Human-Centered-Design and the Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds — Lindsay Moore & Austin Brown

Moore and Austen illustrated how industrial design and interaction design need to come together and consolidate their respective practices so that they can be combined in the grey area of physical-digital products. Lindsay and Austin demonstrated this by suggesting a number of principles, and two very concrete design cases.

First, they argued that there are currently three major principles to User Centered Design (that industrial designers have been dealing with for a long time):

1.  Align with users’ mental models, for instance by using affordances. As once proposed by Don Norman: the compatibility of interface elements with the human properties, such as the size of hands and those of handles.
2. Provide appropriate feedback. All products should make clear what state it is in, so the user knows what are the possible interactions in that state.
3.  Eliminate the opportunity for error. Use constraints. For instance, because of a number of safety guards, a kid cannot accidentally start a car and drive away.

However, interaction designers similarly have more practice at working with behaviour and information, and thus can bring these principles to the table:

4.  Use adaptive displays: Learn & adapt the interface to user behavior
5.  Motivate users: with game and social mechanics
6.  Use information visualization: Let information spark understanding & delight

Powered with these six paradigms, they switched from “the design of everyday things”, to “the redesign of everyday things” (alluding to the work of Donald Norman, who fought for improved usability of our designs by using some of the above-mentioned principles).

Lindsay and Austin attempted this by suggesting two redesigns: a dish washer, and a home thermostat.
The dish washer case primarily focused on adaptive display and information visualisation, attempting to restore the user understanding of the underlying principles of the dish washer. This enabled him to make educated operating choices to accommodate specific needs such as saving time or energy.
The home thermostat case aimed at improving user friendliness by offering an easier and more advanced way of entering weekly schedules and overrides, conceptualized through a wifi-powered iPad.

Evidently, a lot of positive energy went into preparing this talk and the presented designs. Still the talk fell short in inspiring us to really go at it. Maybe this was in part due to the absence of great current examples from the industry (students tittered in the audience that the thermostat is an introductory assigned design project). Maybe the somewhat obvious design principles lacked an innovative edge. However, at the end of the day, the introduction of specialized interaction designers in the realm of what until now has been the exclusive field of industrial design engineers is something to applaud, as there’s much to be gained in combining the strengths of these great disciplines.

Out and About in Boulder

In the afternoon, conference attendees got the chance to try out one of a range of experiences — sound engineering, perfume making, hiking, even mixology. We’ll be putting in photos from the activities as they become available.

Over the last few years, social computing has been relegated to asynchronous websites like FaceBook and Twitter, where users connect with many people and their collective information is harvested for the larger group. However these are still largely individually actions, not synchronous… yet we call it “social”. I would like to expand that definition.

Think of a computer where you sit down and work simultaneously with your friend. Imagine you and your friends all playing a game or solving a problem at the same time on the same computer. This has been one of the key aspects of our vision at Microsoft Surface. As I’ve presented over the last year on Surface, I’ve talked a lot about the aspects of social computing. Initially when I started on the team I was skeptical of social computing as Surface defines it: multiple people working around a single computer. Since that time, I have seen some of the great innovations and situations that Surface style social computing allows. With its vision system (instead of capacitive or infra-red), Surface can recognize 52 simultaneous points of touch, as well as physical objects, making it a computer for a truly social environment.

Social computing is described as the intersection between social behavior and computing systems, and often in somewhat ambiguous computational terms. I question how much of what happens on social sites like FaceBook [et al] is really social (I don’t often come to work sharing a list of 25 personal oddities about myself). The only real social aspect is that you’re sharing items with other people in an easy way across geographic divides. Although the web seems like a macrocosm of that definition. I’m not sure why things like instant messaging are not considered social computing, but they are more social than most sites bearing that label.

I would like to implore readers to expand their definition of the term social computing and realize it can apply to many more situations than it currently is; those being actual social situations. I would describe that as what Surface is aspiring to be, the first true social computer. It provides context and use for multiple people, on all sides. Although true social computing can be done with a single computer and two or more people, it may not be optimal. Below are a few of the ways I’ve come to think about social computer usage:

• Driver as a presenter: this happens when you’re showing someone a YouTube video
• Driver (w/ an influencer or back seat driver): this happens when you’re searching the internet for someone and someone is telling you what do type in
• Turn taking: passing a laptop back and forth to share information
• Simultaneous: both playing a game on Microsoft Surface. I’ll call this synchronous social activities. Very different from the three above it

Of course none of what I describe here is the current way we define social computing, which is why I’m asking people to expand their thinking. Perhaps there is another word to describe these situations? Whatever happens, it’s become clear to me that the computer cannot simply stay as the personal device it has been and designers should begin to think about social proximity activities and behaviors. As technology becomes more pervasive and cultures become more acquiesced to computers, there will be a need and desire to continue and expand the social aspects.

As an aside, while I bring up Surface several times in my posts, please don’t take that for blindly selling the technology. I am very aware of its flaws and issues, and part of my opportunity at Microsoft is to make those better. For those interested, here is my talk from MIX09 on Surface and touch computing where I discuss both my love and discomforts on those topics.

Wouldn’t you have loved, as a child, to have a friendly pillow that would tell you stories? A pillow that looks like he would cuddle you all the time and when you put your head on him, he would start singing songs? I would… and thankfully somebody had the idea to actually create this.

Too many companies develop toys for children from a technological perspective. They come up with gadgets that are very popular for a short time, but are than discarded. Fortunately there are still creative people who understand what children really want and care enough to put much effort in creating positive experiences, putting value above easy money. One of them is Silje Softing, who created Pling Plong: “a media player for stories and sounds, placed inside a pillow. It is designed for the home environment and is meant to stimulate children´s imagination and interest for books. Its low-tech appearance in form, material and its simple functions makes the pillow seem magical. The fact that you can lay your head on it makes the toy very calming and it is meant for relaxing play alone.”

As a child I loved listening to stories. Right next to my bed I had a tape deck where I would play one of the story tapes in my collection. Than I would close my eyes and imagine being in the story. I would have loved to  have a pillow like this. The great thing about the Pling Plong is without a doubt the attempt to make children relax and listen to stories more often. These days children are coming in contact with television and computer games at an increasingly younger age… it’s good to try to counter this with something that is low-tech in appearance and at the same time gives something appealing and interesting to children.

As a designer myself I’m really curious how children respond to the Pling Plong. How does the Pling Plong show to children that it can tell stories? At what point does it start and stop playing and telling? When I’m tired of a story, how can I get a different story? These are things I’m really curious about. And what level of interactivity should it have? I can imagine that parents can be in control, without the child knowing it. Maybe the Pling Plong should have a few (remote) controls, by which it will act in a different way: One of the biggest problems is getting children to bed. Maybe parents should be able to change the mode of Pling Plong, after which it starts singing bed time songs and is slowing down more and more, motivating the child to sleep. Wouldn’t that be great?

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) came up with a way to use any flat surface as a gesture based input device (Scratch input). An absolute breakthrough which makes extraordinary interactions, like for example controlling your television or music player with your wooden kitchen table, possible.

Scratch input is specifically designed to use augmented existing, passive surfaces as an input device. Using a simple sensor which is sticked on the surface, the sound-waves are captured. Due the fact that every movement produces a different sound-pattern, gestures can be recognized.

Interesting about it is that in a lot of cases this will make an interface redundant. And if you do need one, you can design one that looks and feels much more natural and organic.

I could go on explaining how it works but this video does a much better job at that:

What has been explained in the video, and a bit more, can also be found in the paper they published which can be downloaded here.

Chris Harrison, is a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Scott Hudson is a professor at the same institute where he directs the HCII PhD program.