Fostering Design Process of Shape-Changing Interfaces

Shape-changing interfaces match forms and haptics with functions and bring affordances to devices. I believe that shape-changing interfaces will be increasingly available to end-users in the future. To increase acceptance of shape-changing interfaces by end-users, we need to provide designers with design criteria and framework closely grounded on their current skills and needs. Also, we need to provide them with prototyping tools to enable quick assessment of ideas in the physical world. In this paper, I introduce the three threads of my Ph.D. research in the direction of providing the design tools. First, I advance existing shape-changing interface taxonomies to broaden design vocabulary and systemize design framework, based on the classification of everyday objects. Second, I conduct a study with end-users to suggest interaction techniques and design guidelines for shape-changing interfaces from their current practice. Lastly, I develop a physical prototyping tool for shape-changing interfaces to shorten prototyping iterations based on well-known Lego-like bricks.