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The field of interaction design to date has been predominantly concerned with designing products, that is, devices, systems, and more recently services. A growing body of theoretical and empirical analyses suggests that the scope of interaction design needs to be expanded: An explicit concern of the field should include not only helping designers create better products but also helping people themselves create better environments for their work, learning, and leisure activities. In this article we argue that expanding the scope of interaction design beyond products requires a revision of some of the most central concepts in interaction design, including the notion of “the object of design” and our understanding of the impact of technologies on human practices. The aim of the article is to explore some of these conceptual challenges and discuss possible ways of dealing with them. We differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic technology-enabled practice transformation, and foreground the need for interaction design research and practice to more directly deal with analysis and construction of technology-enhanced activity spaces. The implications of these notions for the research agenda of interaction design are discussed.

peer-reviewed In this paper we will outline our approach to studying and understanding place as a notion to guide the design of novel interactive installations in public spaces, in order to augment and enhance, as well as support, peoples’ experience. Our current research project “Shared Worlds” is focusing on two case studies within two different public spaces, a city centre open-air market and an international airport. In the paper we will outline our overall vision of place, as well as detailing the project’s concerns and the specific work being conducted on-site according to particular conceptual approaches.

peer-reviewed We outline a novel approach to human-computer interaction, with soft-buttons using a non-structured touch surface and auditory display.

peer-reviewed This thesis explores the implications of embedding sensing technologies in artefacts in public spaces, and examines how people come to understand and interact with them. Sensing and display technologies will increasingly be embedded into the physical objects and surfaces of our everyday world, due to miniaturization and falling costs. Sensing-based interactions are already being used in the common everyday appliances in our public places, e.g., to control lights, taps, toilets and doors by exploiting body movement. However, the effect of replacing a physical control with a sensing-based control is not only to severely reduce the sense of control in the interaction but in effect it creates an ‘invisible’ interface. This can not only make it difficult for identification, but removes the physical object/interface that can channel users’ intentions and expressions that could be leveraged to provide system feedback. Another challenge in using sensing-based interactions in public settings is that they require special considerations such as immediate usability, short-duration interaction, and shared use. In this thesis, the issue of legibility is developed, explored, and evaluated through a variety of experimental probes and prototypes. The contextual implications of these systems are then explored in different public settings. The prototypes elaborated in this work were developed using a rapid prototyping approach. This approach builds on a custom middleware platform that allows us to evaluate the designs in different settings, and goes beyond once-off or proof-of-concept lab demonstrators. We examine factors such as use and appropriation of these prototypes outside the lab, in real-world demonstration situations in order to evaluate whether our designs were successful in making the prototype legible enough for users to interpret the system, both its activity and their relation to it. The findings reveal a number of important considerations in how we should design for technologies that transform the spaces they occupy. In particular they indicate that if people are to be aware of anything then it has to be explicitly made publicly available to their perceptions within the space they occupy.