Investigating Expressive Tactile Interaction Design in Artistic Graphical Representations

Abstract

In this article, a design research approach is taken to investigate expressive design of tactile interactions. Most research efforts to date on designing and exploring the representational aspects of tactile interfaces have focused on usability and task-oriented scenarios. Yet, there is limited knowledge on how to aid the design of tactile interfaces that support the design of expressive or user-experience-oriented tactile interactions. We address this gap by studying tactile designs in a multisensory context, where the tactile interface augments works of visual art. The expressive and artistic context introduces new opportunities to extend on previous work, and identify new design and interaction potentials with tactile interfaces in graphical multisensory scenarios. During one-on-one guided design sessions, visual artists were asked to create tactile design prototypes that augmented one of their existing works. Each element of the overall tactile design, regarded as a tactile feature , was analyzed using both the bottom-up and top-down approaches. The results discovered through grounded theory are presented and discussed with respect to semiotic theory. Accordingly, tactile constructs and tactile intents define the “form” and “meaning” components of each tactile feature, respectively. Overall analysis of the findings indicates associations among the identified categories and between the two components, leading to design implications for expressive tactile interfaces. Insights from the tactile intents suggest a set of affordances for expressive visuotactile interactions, which we introduce under the notion of expressive roles . Additionally, implications from the tactile constructs indicate a design space for an expressive tactile augmentation design tool, based on which a user interface architecture is proposed. Findings from this research can assist in developing systems and tools for expressive tactile interface design and inspire research in user experience and behavior in multisensory tactile interaction scenarios.