Introduction: Framing Peripheral Interaction

Abstract

In everyday life, we perform several activities in our periphery of attention. For example, we are aware of what the weather is like and we can routinely wash our hands without actively thinking about it. However, we can also easily focus on these activities when desired. Contrarily, interactions with computing devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, usually require focused attention, or even demand it through flashing displays, beeping sounds, and vibrations used to alert people. Hence, these interactions move more unpredictably between periphery and center of attention compared to non-computer-mediated activities. With the number of computers embedded in our everyday environment increasing, inevitably interaction with these computers will move to the periphery of attention. Inspired by the way we fluently divide our attentional resources over various activities in everyday life, we call this type of interaction “peripheral interaction.” We believe that considering and enabling peripheral interaction with computing technology contributes to more seamlessly embedding of such technology in everyday routines. This chapter briefly explores the history of peripheral interaction as a field of research and lays out how peripheral interaction, in our view, fits into the larger domain of interactive systems and HCI.