Designing Interactive Behaviours Beyond the Desktop

As interactions move beyond the desktop, interactive behaviours (effects of actions as they happen, or once they happen) are becoming increasingly complex. This complexity is due to the variety of forms that objects might take, and the different inputs and sensors capturing information, and the ability to create nuanced responses to those inputs. Current interaction design tools do not support much of this rich behaviour authoring. In my work I create prototyping tools that examine ways in which designers can create interactive behaviours. Thus far, I have created two prototyping tools: Pineal and Astral, which examine how to create physical forms based on a smart object's behaviour, and how to reuse existing desktop infrastructures to author different kinds of interactive behaviour. I also contribute conceptual elements, such as how to create smart objects using mobile devices, their sensors and outputs, instead of using custom electronic circuits, as well as devising evaluation strategies used in HCI toolkit research which directly informs my approach to evaluating my tools.