Expected, sensed, and desired: A framework for designing sensing-based interaction

Benford, S., Schnädelbach, H., Koleva, B., Anastasi, R., Greenhalgh, C., Rodden, T., Green, J., Ghali, A., Pridmore, T., Gaver, B., Boucher, A., Walker, B., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., Gellersen, H., and Steed, A. 2005. Expected, sensed, and desired: A framework for designing sensing-based interaction. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 12, 1 (Mar. 2005), 3-30

Nowadays, there are 4 trends/challenges that drive interfaces, namely the growth of sensor-based interaction, the diversification of physical forms, increasing mobility, and focus on playful engaging and creative application. The authors believe that interface designer will increasingly have to wrestle with matching physical form to the capabilities of sensors and the shifting requirements of applications. The introduce a framework inspired by their initial experiences to encourage designer to tackle this issue by analyzing expected, sensed and desired movements.

Example of sensed and not expected: GPS can sense when a PDA is raised several hundreds of meters above the ground (e.g. if the user is hang-gliding) or is moving faster than walking speed (running of in a vehicle). Not sensed but desired would be indoor positioning. Sensed and not expected/desired could be jitters in positioning.

Relation to my thesis: I am interested on how users react and interact with sensing systems. Sensors are no longer separate components of a pervasive system, they form an integral part. However, they often suffer from considerable inaccuracy over space and time (GPS, video tracking) and lead to a much higher level of uncertainty in the interaction (unlike traditional devices for direct interaction such as the mouse or keyboard). I tend to have a holistic approach to design location-aware, ubiquitous systems (linking the core, to the interface, to the user, and the core to the user with a machine learning perspective). The framework proposed by Benford et al. can help moving towards more detailed design specification of location-aware systems.