Abstract
This research project is about everyday interactive products: digital cameras, washing machines, TV and audio sets, pocket calculators, electrical bikes, electronic toys, etc. It focuses on the mediation of these products: their ability to influence people's behavior in the long run. We want to give designers of such interactive products fundamental insight in the mechanism of mediation, in order to turn mediation into a design driver: a product objective that can be actively steered by the designer, during the design process. More specifically, we want to investigate how an embodied interaction approach to the design of these products influences their mediation.
The project employs a Research-through-Design (RtD) methodology, combined with a long-term field test. As a practical context for the RtD process, we choose the conception of an interactive product with a predefined mediation. The product aims to stimulate the connection of elderly people over 70 with their close family and friends, in order to counter their isolation and feeling of loneliness. It is an interactive household product, located in the home of the older person.
In a first, exploratory part of the project, the interactive product is preliminarily designed, with its predefined mediation in mind. Through an iterative process of design, user testing and reflection, we get a grip on the concept of mediation as a design driver and on its intertwinement with embodied interaction, in the design process of an interactive product.
In a second part, a demonstrator of the newly designed product is developed and produced in a small series. These demonstrators are deployed in a long-term field test, and placed at participants' homes for several weeks. Through regular interviews and recorded demonstrator data, the interaction patterns of the participants with the demonstrator are revealed, and compared with the predefined mediation.
Throughout the project, the Design for Embodied Mediation framework is gradually forged, and tested by setting up design projects for students at Product Development, University of Antwerp, and at Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. The relevance of the framework for design practice is assessed by confronting it with professional design experts.
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