In the design of the interactive elements of Sniff, Sara had to use visual diagramming as a way of exploring, understanding and prototyping with non-visual feedback such as sound and vibration (haptics).
Sara developed a speech bubble approach to annotating physical objects, so that they look like they are ‘saying’ the audio and haptic feedback.
The representation of sound and vibration uses waveforms, showing amplitude over time. Although this is quite limited, it seems to be a useful shorthand for communicating a small range of tangible feedback.
On this note, I’m getting increasingly interested in the use of speech bubbles in popular media.
Related things:
- Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2009 We recently presented our paper Designing with RFID at the Tangible and Embedded Interaction conference in Cambridge UK. This presentation was part of a session on ‘enabling technologies and design techniques’. The presentation focused......
- Making radio tangible Next week we’re launching some new work that explores the spatial aspects of RFID. So before we publish that, here is a quick summary of existing work on radio, sensors and space that I’ve......
- Touch as interaction medium This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. In London, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and elsewhere the ‘swipe’ or ‘tap’ is already a common interaction for paying......
- Sniff After two years of development, many awards and publications, we have finally given Sara Johanssons’s Sniff the proper communication it deserves. Sniff is first and foremost a high-quality physical toy dog, that can withstand......
- Two new articles on RFID interaction Touch project PhD researcher Kjetil Nordby has just published two journal articles on interactions with RFID and NFC. These articles pull together concepts from ubiquitous computing and HCI, integrated with high-level interaction design practice,......