 So I will talk about the materials that people like Fabian and I are working with interaction designers engineers and developers when when building interactive systems I will talk about digitals and how digitals in a way set the design material for us as interaction designers and developers within this field and how they need to be thought of as Design materials pretty much like how paper wood and concrete are materials to us But also we need to consider how Digitals are Dynamic and not static materials So when I say digitals, I mean hardware and software anything that sort of Potentially affects the user experience a user might have with some interactive system I refer to artifacts such as the computer or the mobile phone or even some Toolkit with sensors and activators that aren't even the mobile phone anymore I refer to circuit boards that are within those artifacts and the components on those circuit boards such as Accelerometer sensors activators, whatever Consisters but also even the soldering that sort of connects those components to the circuit boards might affect some user Experience if we're going to design something so fine-tuned as as the work that we've heard about before the hand interactions and so on and I'm even referring to the in-between The radio the wireless in between these artifacts and even the programming languages sometimes affect the user experience So Digitals are hard to work with I'm an engineer in my background and in engineering school We are taught to plan ahead. We are taught not to build before we know what we're gonna build We're taught to sketch our system do a flow chart and then set off building what we have planned for This while designers are taught to open up Explore their materials and develop their idea together with the material Discover the material properties that can expand on their idea They are taught to explore their material so that they can push what is possible some at some point someone learned how to put wood in water and Discovered how it's then bendable and odd then we can do new things with this material And this is while we as interaction designers We stem from the engineering tradition interaction design is still a pretty new design field and We are taught as we're working with digital's to plan our work before we start to build We are not taught to explore like textile designers or even architects Or or some other designer This leads to us very often end up fighting our materials. This often leads to You getting buggy systems in your hands because we are taught to just build something This also leads to the mobile phone being squared all the time because we are taught that the screen is square And then we work with the screen being square. We don't really sit down and explore the materials We we are working with so this is a system. I built as a newly appointed PhD student in 2003 also Exploring physicality and body language. This is the emoto system It was a system. You look skeptical. It was in 2003 It was a system that because at that time we wrote text messages to each other Digital communication didn't allow for very much of body language and body language sets a whole lot of the Communication we have in between people so as design research We wanted to explore how can we design for more of body language in digital communication and I I was appointed to build something in this direction together with a designer a graphics designer called anastole And being a pretty regular graphics designer and a pretty regular engineer We we set out to build this system So being pretty regular we are taught to sort of plan our work We went out to users listen for what they wanted in the direction of body language in the digital communication We did persona sketched on whoever are we directing this system to and we did user scenarios So in pretty regular brainstorming sessions We came to the idea of the motor system a motor system would then allow a user to feel more of the emotions He or she wanted to communicate So the interaction we thought of was that the user would open her phone and see a pretty neutral Screen and then she would write her or he write her text message His text message and then do the gesturing and the phone would answer to those emotional gestures We wanted to move away from smileys that were really popular at the time. We wanted to allow for something personal We wanted not to squeeze everyone down to one expression. We wanted everyone to Be free to choose whatever expression they wanted for happiness for example and at that time phones had sort of these little sticks Stylus pens and we thought that we could extend such stylus pen with maxelometer and a pressure sensor to Allow a user to press the pen really hard and shake it when wanted to Communicate something aggressive or sort of fiddle around with it a bit lighter when wanting to express something more joyful Because we also looked at body language and we found that people get more tense when wanting to express something negative So we thought like oh we can we can pick up on that and and have that as an underlying basis to Go let people go in a certain direction for expressions similar to anger for example and then let people choose So in the background of this system, we thought of a two-dimensional model Combining pressure and movement to let people express their emotions and We built that system and it was weird then it's still a bit weird It's still valid as a research contribution though. We haven't really got to this point yet So we were good research designers in that we were far ahead We are going in this direction. We see more and more physicality in computer interaction today Just think about the connect and all the sports applications we have We did something wrong though because being a pretty regular engineer I wanted to behave well and save battery power So therefore I made sure that we just had the Bluetooth connection between the pen and the phone on when it was about to be used That ended up destroying the whole feel of the system the system worked as I told you before You could send those messages you could do the gesturing and everything like that But what happened was that when you did your gestures you did like angry gesture Nothing happened you did angry gesture You did the angry gesture you did something less angry and then the system answered so By doing it that way we sort of lost the engagement of our users The system worked but we lost the engagement. They built up doing the gestures in the first place What we should have been doing was of course to explore Bluetooth We should have got to know the potential materials that we were about to work with and thinking of Bluetooth from a more Designarily point of view Bluetooth is a 40 meters in diameter big swear It's would fill this room and thinking about it that way You know you can get a whole lot of thoughts on systems feeding off being inside and outside such swear And in my lab We are designers and engineers HII specialists Psychologists whatever and we need to work together We need to understand our design material that we're all working with whoever we are because even the Psychologists even though they're not building the system are part of the system design and we all need to come together and understand Digitals and this is why we have in my team. We have what we call the inspirational bits and These are some interaction designers Playing with an inspirational bit teaching them how Bluetooth So we have these kinds of bits in various materials and here they're running around there is this blue Pete jumping between their foes Oh So the joy here actually helps because they're having fun together and afterwards We can sit down and discuss what they actually did what they can learn from something like this They can learn the joy of a boring stiff technology like Bluetooth But they can also learn that Bluetooth doesn't see walls and floors the way we as humans do They can learn the reach of Bluetooth and how it changes with the human body and so forth It doesn't help to run into the ladies room for example, but it can also open up their imagination for cool We could build systems that sort of have something jump Through the floor to the second ground here or something that would be cool So we can open up for a material discussion within the theme that hasn't been possible before But it's also important to understand that Bluetooth or any radio technology here its sensor nodes They don't really form a perfectly round swear because if we allow for such imagination We we build up for the wrong expectations on technologies So here you have interaction designers working around with a sensor node that is attached to another sensor node so what you see on the screen here is the radio signal strength between two sensor nodes and By doing it this way they can walk around and see okay So when I come closer, I see that the signal is stronger. It's also more stable I can see that it disappears behind my back I can also see that it fluctuates and that is something I need to count for in my design Bluetooth or any radio technology today fluctuates and it's not really something that we think we will solve tomorrow It will continue to fluctuate per technologies aren't these perfect things That we tend to think about and we need to Sort of count for that in our designs because we will design better than But it's not only about discovering Limitations, it's also about discovering possibilities So here are a few interaction designers playing with accelerometers and discovering how they are Super super good at comparing Movement and how they are moved in space So if she dances here in front of them they can dance in the back and then the accelerometer can tell Down to the data bit How close they were to the leader in front of them? And that is really good information because accelerometers tend to be used to capture movement But they actually don't capture movement and the word tell us that we should know that Because a movement like this Is just caught here to the end or to the start and the end Then in the middle, it's the same movement and it doesn't accelerate then nothing is captured So they don't capture movement. We shouldn't go that way when deciding with accelerometers We should go for comparisons. You can move one device and then another and that way you can capture movement For example, so you need to come to understand your design materials And this is pretty much the way any designer work with their materials But we need to come to understand that digital's all our materials and even radio is a material And this is why paper prototyping doesn't work anymore, you know, because it's not just about Traditional mobile phones now we're heading into this everyone is it's the buzzword the internet of things society But we really are actually we've been talking about this society for 10 plus years And it's been a wet dream connecting all devices around and so on But now we have the technical glue the internet to make this possible But then we need to understand because now it's just stay not just stable things in our hands anymore Thank you