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This paper is about embodied interaction with digital products and systems, and more specifically, about its aesthetics. We establish a particular form of aesthetics: the aesthetics of coupling. We start with illustrating them by presenting two design research projects, the rich actions camera and the Experimental Payment Terminal. We discuss the characteristics of the aesthetics and coin their corner stone concepts, the persistent and the temporal. After that, we present the design process of two conceptual products: a night lamp and a medication dispenser. Both projects demonstrate how to design for the aesthetics of coupling. In a reflection, we position the aesthetics of coupling among several existing perspectives on interaction aesthetics and elaborate on their significance for the design community. We conclude this paper by highlighting the broad lines of our framework and by indicating directions for future research.

This PhD thesis titled “Embodied interaction in a world full of displays” presents a future vision for designing digital products. Our world is flooded with digital products. Our interaction with these digital products is standardized and largely restricted to the four corners of a display. Usually we interact with these digital products by tapping on icons that are displayed in the graphical user interface. This poorly corresponds with how we as humans naturally interact in the real world. The overall goal of the thesis is to employ embodied interaction to explore and propose new ways to interact with digital products that more closely resemble our natural way of interacting in the real world. In order to achieve this a Research through Design method was used. New interaction possibilities were investigated in a concrete and hands-on way by developing and testing prototypes of digital products. In the first experiments, several prototypes of children’s toys with a tangible user interface are developed to investigate a token-based interaction approach. These prototypes are designed to provide tangible alternatives for playing games on a tablet. In these first experiments all graphically-displayed digital information or graphical content is replaced with physical objects or tokens. Where the first experiments set out to replace all graphical content with physical ones, the final experiments instead recognize the added value of graphical content and aim to achieve an advantageous combination or synergy between physical content and graphical content. Different ways to achieve synergy between physical content and graphical content were explored and demonstrated. Finally, a new framework for designing digital products is presented called the hybrid synergy framework.