Designing Blended Spaces

David Benyon,Serkan Ayan,Oli Mival

doi:10.14236/ewic/hci2012.1

Abstract

We present an approach to the design of mixed reality spaces that aims to create a more harmonized and unified user experience. We refer to these as blended spaces. Blended spaces draw upon a description of physical and digital spaces in terms of the ontology, topology, volatility and agency. By describing physical and digital spaces in these terms we are able to use the process and design principles of conceptual blending to arrive at a design that maximizes the relationships between the spaces. It also guides the development of the touch points between the physical and digital spaces. We discuss the user experience in blended spaces and briefly allude to the significant philosophical implications that blended spaces of the future will have to deal with.

Highlights

Mixed reality comes in a number of forms, spanning the reality spectrum described by Milgram and Kishino (Milgram and Kishino, 1994) from digitally enhanced physical spaces to physically enhanced digital spaces (Figure 1)
Steve Benford and his colleagues have been looking at mixed reality for some years (Benford, Greenhalgh, Reynard and Kolva 1998) and more recently talk about hybrid spaces and how people move through trajectories of hybrid experiences (Benford, Giannachi, Kolva and Rodden, 2009)
Wagner et al, (Wagner, Broll, Jacucci, Kuutii, McCall, Morrison, Schmalstieg, and Terrin, 2009) discuss this need to recognize that people are not present in mixed reality spaces, they move through different experiences and engage in rich, new social phenomena

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Mixed reality comes in a number of forms, spanning the reality spectrum described by Milgram and Kishino (Milgram and Kishino, 1994) from digitally enhanced physical spaces to physically enhanced digital spaces (Figure 1). Fauconnier and Turner provide a number of principles and guidelines for understanding how to design ‘at a human scale’ We take these ideas and apply them to the design of mixed reality, blended spaces. Drawing upon the principles of blends suggested by Fauconnier and Turner (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) they present a number of design principles These include designing to preserve an appropriate topology for the blended space, allowing people to unpack the blend so that they can understand where the new conceptual space has come from. Imaz and Benyon present an abstract design method that shows how conceptual blending can be used during the analysis phase to understand the issues of a particular situation and how they can be used during the design stage to produce and critique design solutions They discuss the existence of the trash can on the Windows desktop. The overall aim of blended spaces is to design for a great user experience, at a human scale

THE POETRY GARDEN

The Physical Space

The Conceptual Space

The Digital Space

The Blended Space

Summary

EXPERIENCE IN BLENDED SPACES

Conclusions