Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

From Tangible Bits to Seamful Designs: Learnings from
HCI Research
Petra Sundström, Sebastian Osswald, Manfred Tscheligi
Christian Doppler Laboratory for "Contextual Interfaces"
HCI & Usability Unit, ICT&S Center,
University of Salzburg
Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse 18, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
firstname.lastname@sbg.ac.at
ABSTRACT
In this two-page position paper we draw attention to a few
design concepts and learnings from the HCI community
that we find important for car researchers to learn from
when now entering the design space of gestures and
movement-based interaction in the car.
Keywords
Tangible Bits, Gestures, Movement-Based Interaction,
Seamful Designs, Materiality and Interdisciplinary Design.
INTRODUCTION
As the call for this workshop states, natural user interfaces
(NUIs) by means of gesture and speech interaction is
becoming an important topic in car related research as well
as already for products related to infotainment and
entertainment. In HCI, tangibility, gestures and movementbased
interaction have received great attention for at least
the last fifteen years, since Ishii and Ullmer introduced
their notion of Tangible Bits in 1997 [5]. We therefore for
this workshop want to direct attention to a few of the
advances and issues on these matters from the HCI
community in general. We bring attention to Benford and
colleagues framework on Sensing-Based Interaction [1],
Chalmers and MacColl s argumentation for seamful
designs [4], as well as the coming research trends in HCI
concerning Materiality and Interdisciplinary Design.
FROM TANGIBILE BITS TO FREE MOVING GESTURES
Ishii and Ullmer were groundbreaking when they in 1997
introduced their concept of Tangible Bits [5]. What Ishii
and Ullmer suggested was to make the background
happenings of a computer system more understandable to
its users by connecting the underlying bits /happenings to
physical objects the user could interact with and thereby
come to understand how these underlying events were
connected to each other in the interaction. From tangible
designs, but also on its own, systems using free moving
gestures developed, from systems using simply hand
gestures [6] to systems using full body movements, as in
dancing interaction for example [3]. Today we even see
more and more commercial systems letting users interact
with their whole body freely in space, e.g. the Kinect
system.
A slightly forgotten issue though when leaving the specifics
of button pressing for more free physical interaction, is the
notion of what aspects of those body movements or
gestures a system need/should pick up upon in order to
fulfill a desired user experience. Is it really the specific
gesture as such a system needs to know of in order to make
the internal decisions for what feedback to return to the
user, or is it the overall shape or size of the gestures that are
needed, or the effort required or the intensity or perhaps it
is some other aspect of the movements that is required?
There is a brilliant paper by Benford and colleagues
discussing these issues of connecting the users
expectations of a system with what the system is/can be
sensing in order to fulfill what is desired of a specific
system design [1]. To capture the complete picture of some
movements is, if not impossible, but very hard to
accomplish. Since it most often is not the complete picture
that is needed there should be thorough discussions on
these matters in the interdisciplinary design team, so that
the designer not has one thing in mind and the engineer
another and also so that not time is wasted trying to
accomplish something that actually is not needed to allow
for some desired user experience.
FROM SEAMLESSNESS TO SEAMFULNESS
In order to track some characteristic or some characteristics
of free moving gestures there is today a range of new
sensor technologies, such as accelerometers, RFID tags,
NFC, various other radio technologies, such as WiFi or
Bluetooth, and in the car also various camera technologies
can be possible.
When these technologies first became possible for
designers to work with it was the ubiquitous society we
were talking of, a world where every thing and every user
would be smoothly connected and the user would be able to
interact with anything, anywhere without having to think
about it. That world never really happened, instead we
found ourselves both as designers and users struggling with
being connected and understanding why we, or some
equipment we had, were not connected all the time (that
more or less until now). And even though being connected
now in many ways can be said to be a resolved problem,
and that perhaps especially in the car, Chalmers and
MacColl s spot on argumentation for seamful designs [4] in
opposition to this dream of seamlessness is still relevant,
and that perhaps especially in the car that nowadays is more