In the paper Unlocking the Expressivity of Point Lights by Harrison, Chris, et al. (2012), the authors present a design process where they start by looking at what information commonly is communicated through LEDs and how it is done. They found that the LED:s are used to display different information, but there is not much variation in how it is communicated. Through a design session, they came up with light behaviors and a vocabulary for light states e.g. The device has a low battery. To test if the light behavior communicates the information, they made user tests. The aim was to see how well light behavior correlated with the informational state. The users would rate how well they disagree or agree with an interpretation of the behavior.
They found that even though it’s hard to find a light behavior that clearly signals one function/situation, you can find light behaviors that have a strong connection to a category of functions/situations and those could be used as a starting point when designing light behaviors.
Reading the paper gave me a feeling of recognition. During the prototyping course, we worked with movement as a way to interact with a plant. We also found it hard to find a movement that everyone interprets the same way, but we could see that some movement was interpreted in the same category eg the plant is lacking something. Also, the fact that small adjustments can change the whole concept or interpretation of the interaction was something that we experienced during that work.
Reading the paper and having the prototyping course experience leaves me wondering how much information one medium can carry and still being understandable. Perhaps we can’t and shouldn’t design for minor details but instead focus on the broader understanding of a behavior. Maybe this is something that I will be able to explore in or project.
Harrison, C., Horstman, J., Hsieh, G., & Hudson, S. (2012, May). Unlocking the expressivity of point lights. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1683-1692.