Designing Swing Compass with Liveliness: From Personal to Public Interactions

This paper describes the ongoing project Swing Compass, a configurable recommendation system whose framework is built upon the notion of embodied interaction and blending theory in pursuit of meaning making in users from the operational to the reflective levels. The framework, named "liveliness", is summarized as a protocol of cognitive processes and the methodology includes interpretive analyses, experience prototyping, and user participation. The first instance of Swing Compass is a handheld personal device, which analogically maps recommended items based on intrinsic properties to directions on the compass rose. The second instance is a table-sized public installation, which explores to map out recommendations with their physical locations. Swing Compass is lively in that the recommendations change over time to avoid selection bias. The design challenges span from human scales, perceived affordances, to perception and interpretation of changes. The empirical findings provide real and particular samples for the protocol and inform specific design guidelines for future development.