The project Blended Interaction Design investigates novel methods and techniques
along with computational support that seek to augment the physical, cognitive,
and social aspects of creative interaction design activities.

MOTIVATION

Interaction design is broadly perceived as a recent trend in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that emphasizes on designing user experiences with technology [1,2]. Its interpretations differ between the two converging perspectives: 'Interaction design as a design discipline' and 'Interaction design as an extension of HCI' [2]. In recent years, HCI research developed methods, techniques, and tools that aim on supporting interaction designers in practice. However, due to insufficient integration, application in practice remains sparse [3]. One of the reasons for this is that interaction design research 'has not been grounded in or guided by a sufficient understanding and acceptance of the nature of design practice' [4, p.56]. Consequently, there is a growing interest in the role and nature of design in HCI research [5,6]. These contributions have already increased awareness in interaction design practice [1,7] and will influence research over time.

RESEARCH APPROACH

In order to support design practice in HCI it is necessary to understand and describe design rationality [4], a notion that has been labeled with concepts such as the reflective practitioner [9] or the thoughtful designer [6]. More detailed descriptions and examples of disciplined behavior of designers can be found in [1,10] and [11]. These authors show that following activities, among others, are characteristic for design rationality:

• Sketching is at the core of design and is used to explore relationsships between design ideas, form and function as well as big picture and details.
• Exploring many different alternatives in a conversational way while constantly shifting focus between ill-defined problems and solutions is the prevalent work style.
• Spatial structures, like design studios and display walls make artifacts visible and provide the fundament for effective team collaboration.
• Social structures like design critique and frequent review cycles make judgements visible and are the foundation of design argumentation.
• Eventually, constant process awareness is essential to deal with the complexity of open-ended design tasks.

However, HCI struggles with integrating these 'designerly ways' [10] into practice based on several reasons:

• Because of the dynamic nature of design artifacts within interaction design - like prototype simulations or animations - computational tools are employed as powerful means of expression. However, the effort to built such artifacts often exceeds the value they have for the evaluation of design ideas.
• Due to predominant single-state document model of desktop-based software, most computational tools actually employed in practice impose a rather linear progression through design tasks [12].
• Many employed tools merely focus on the task of constructing a single design instead of supporting the messy nature of designer's explorative and spatial thinking modes [4].
• Artifacts and decisions are often buried in file systems and hide possible relations that might be valuable as part of the creative process of ideation.
• Desktop-based design tools also impose physical constraints on accessibility that makes informal creative meetings and creative collaboration awkward.
• Many of these limitations lead to a coexistence of informal artifacts like paper sketches and whiteboard drawings that are hard to archive and share but are valuable resources for design reflection and reuse.

METHOD & DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Based on the described foundations, we are designing a novel tool landscape that we call 'Blended Interaction Design'. In previous research, we gained valuable insights with 'blending' agile Software Engineering methods into HCI that we will bring into these efforts [13]. We aim to support a creative perspective on computational support for design activities. As a first step, we explored the key features of our research domain and examined related work. Based on observational studies of design practive within interaction design courses, we decided to frame our efforts on the physical, cognitive and social aspects that we found most important.

INTERACTION CONCEPTS

Based on the described principles we are designing and implementing visualization and interaction techniques based on a spatial, cross-device workspace that integrates with the physical structure of a computation-augmented design studio setting. Within our lab Media Room we are exploring various settings with interactive whiteboards, pen tablets, digital pen and paper, large high-resolution displays, and tabletops. Therefore, we combine physical interaction concepts that built upon the principles of natural interaction (e.g. tangible design artifacts) with an object-oriented zoomable user interface paradigm ZOIL [14]. By integrating informal sketching techniques and powerful design space visualizations based on a network of interconnected artifacts we will explore adequate support for collaborative creativity. Groupware features as well as techniques for communicating designs based on informal annotations will be used to facilitate co-located collaboration.

CONTRIBUTIONS

This research project is funded by the German Research Foundation
DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft),grant number RE 1843/3-1