Toward Design Principles for Invisible Interfaces

An important and long-standing goal of interaction design i s to make interfaces invisible. Effective interaction design in embodied computing must map the inputs and outputs of the computational process with the qualities of the physical artifact in which it is embedded, taking into account qualities such as size, shape, texture, material, and geometry. To go beyond ad-hoc demonstration projects, style guides, pattern languages, and toolkits, a principled approach to designing embodied interaction is needed. We present in this paper a collection of physical computing projects that leverages our understanding of physicality of objects and describe principles and classifications that link them together.