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Designing with haptics - Participation Award
Challenge
Every day we come into contact with an assortment of objects and interfaces. Each interaction creates stimulation and at times... emotion and tears. Our bodies are essentially a 'mass of sensors'. Just as visual design is using what we see, and sound as what we hear, moving away from these senses requires the body to readjust the senses.
How might we establish a new way to think about work involving haptics?
Objective
Seek an understanding of using the sense of touch to direct motion and connection between the human and object
Incorporate texture, reality, and emotion into an activity to encourage design formulation.
Design Framework
The task involved a few parameters to which discovery for this product came to light. Rubik's Cube solving was at its peak moments and I wanted to capitalize on finding out what made solving so fun. Taking algorithms and memorizing patterns drew a lot of attention, and the focus on getting the right sets aligned had me curious to try and define a new limitation of design: the color itself. By removing color and focusing on the patterns on the face, the player would immediately take away from needing to look at the cube altogether. It was a moment of eureka that got me invested in pushing forward and developing unique textures.
Texture as Emotion
Today's society has been filled with touching smooth surfaces on small screen displays. Long gone have been the LEGO bricks causing constant foot distress or finger aching peeling of pieces, or the relief of fresh air cranking of levers to open the window pane of an old 1980s car. The mass smartphone and button-dialing phones have dulled our sense of touch at our fingertips. We've now added more dependency on sight-to-hand eye coordinate visual flat screen markings on touch screens to turn on a convection stove top.
When will we ever return to designing with textures to improve our sense of spatial awareness? When can texture come to play with our senses in new ways? As I built more and more textures for this cube, I learned that there are great takeaways to add texture. Some inspire confusion, others to incite comfort. All of these are not flat to create a sense of action with the finger as it rubs across the oblique surface.
Texture as Alignment for Communication
Just like a poster explaining a band's performance in a clear and concise space, we can also deliver this information with touch. The key to good communication is recognition by content. The less words to describe more about the situation, the better. In the mind of the object, it is just an existence, but what makes it remarkable are the stains, the etches, the antiquity that brings that object to life and give it character.
Object
The subject matter of all communication requires the object to be given its reference. Specifically avoiding this creates the confusion of what the reference is about, requiring retracing of the next sequence of steps to understand what to do with the subject.
Orientation
Compiling how to view the subject is next in line. It's very key to locate the precise position of reference. Some objects are easy to identify with what the object may do, like a handle on a glass door. Whereas other objects like a box can have wildly more variety. Knowing which item to associate with is like having a good label to identify the particular position to be in.
Operation
Finally, the action to achieve the next position. This crucial part combines all the efforts of coordination. Utilizing as well the texture helps formulate a grip and understanding of kinematics to better hold the object in hand.
Design and Experience
The design involved 3d printing the mechanisms and textured layouts to account for embedded positions. Adding to the challenge of nice fittings and tight alignment, I have also used a few speed cubes to compare fit and performance.
What became evident after building the prototype (on the right) was trying to identify the object's condition after the scramble. Once scrambled, there was a challenge to identify which faces were in the right position. Symmetrical texture face the greatest obstacle for the user of not knowing if it's on the right face but the incorrect position. Asymmetrical textures offered the most information about its relative rotational position to get to the right unscrambled spot.
Reflection and Next Step
This project opened a lot of understanding in terms of opening up senses, especially in the ways users interact with sensory objects. Considering the future of light switches, or a tool to develop textures on smooth surfaces based on vibrations, the limitless amount of opportunities to use touch to realign operations follow me to this day. I hope to one day bring this idea out to the world and offer a speed Rubik's Cube-solving competition where users are just blindfolded and find a way to solve this without sight of the faces to begin with.
I built a small set of these and gave them all to my friends who all have adorned the product. Each individual had a unique face.
This project received a Participation Award, recognized for its intuitive thought and sense of textures in a simple and easy-to-manipulate object.
Effective Communication Summary
One of the challenges of working in a communicative field presents itself with its unique challenge. The rigidity in the object-orientation-operation concept propelled many great design automation tools, but conversations with coworkers who didn't follow this pattern became incoherent. I learned that emotions played a role and sometimes it is important to not focus so rigidly on the concept. Having only two or one aspect of the concept to have a conversation is just as important. Creating stories through less-than-efficient usage of words is a creative way to understand characters and learn about behavioral cues.
I learned also that this concept applies to learning languages. The structure of getting the message across with built sentence structure is more communicative the more details are expressed. The playfulness of words and sentences can be expressed more creatively when one or more aspects of the concept are concealed.
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