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How to support designers in getting hold of the immaterial material of software

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

When designing novel GUI controls, interaction designers are challenged by the "immaterial" materiality of the digital domain; they lack tools that effectively support a reflecting conversation with the material of software as they attempt to conceive, refine, and communicate their ideas. To investigate this situation, we conducted two participatory design workshops. In the first workshop, focused on conceiving, we observed that designers want to invent controls by exploring gestures, context, and examples. In the second workshop, on refining and communicating, designers proposed tools that could refine movement, document context through usage scenarios, and support the use of examples. In this workshop they struggled to effectively communicate their ideas for developers because their ideas had not been fully explored. In reflecting on this struggle, we began to see an opportunity for the output of a design tool to be a boundary object that would allow for an ongoing conversation between the design and the material of software, in which the developer acts as a mediator for software.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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  1. communication
  2. design process
  3. interactive controls
  4. tools

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