Designing Mobile Interactions: Exploring Situated Use and Active Participation in Mobile Interaction Design

Abstract

This dissertation presents four years of academic inquiry into the question of how to design meaningful mobile interactions. The dissertation aims at developing tools and techniques, informed by active participation and situated use, for designing meaningful mobile interfaces. It has been developed using a Research through Design approach, in which the author has conducted experimental design work in order to investigate and experiment with active participation and situated use to scaffold mobile design inquiry. The results of the PhD work are published as seven separate papers, submitted to esteemed journals and conferences within the field of interaction design and HCI.The work is motivated both by an growing interest in design tools and prototyping techniques for non-idiomatic interfaces in the field of human computer interaction and interaction design, and the demand for use practice and user involvement within those fields. At the core of the dissertation lies an interest in embodied interaction and physical prototyping to explore mobile technology use while being in motion. Especially “plug and play” technologies, tools and materials (e.g., Arduino toolkits, e-textiles, mobiles, actuators and sensors) provide new opportunities for rapid prototyping, involving non-programmers in the design process and design-in-use techniques for mobile interfaces. I report on the use of different constructive design methods including probes, toolkits and prototypes from four design projects. Furthermore, I discuss how I included situated use and active participation in these design projects.The two key results from the dissertation are the mobile interaction design framework describing the relation between situated use and active participation for mobile interaction design, and engaging prototyping as design method. The aim of the mobile interaction design framework is to guide future design projects and proposes four activities when designing mobile interfaces: constructing, shaping, experiencing and understanding. Designers construct mobile artefacts such as toolkits or underdesigned prototypes to open up the design space. Participants shape these artefacts to create functional and personal mobile interfaces. Participants experience these mobile interfaces in use and share their experiences with the designer to create a shared understanding of meaningful mobile interfaces. Engaging prototyping implements these activities in a design method suggesting both a procedure, tools and techniques for creating alternative mobile interfaces.