Complex behaviors

Study and conception of a refined interaction

Date & duration: 2019 – 6 weeks

Skills: Aduino – Cartography – User research – IOT

Brief: Interacting with daily objects: study and conception of a refined interaction

Interacting with objects is definitely part of our everyday life. Through sounds, lights or screens, our daily objects are sending us messages. But what makes an interaction effective or pleasant? How can we design a successful interaction when “successful” means both effective and enjoyable?

We defined the right balance between five types of behaviors.

Our starting point was a wide exploration of the tiny interactions we have with objects. Thanks to all the gathered videos we built a cartography of the communication modes of our objects. We defined five types of behaviors: human, robotic, animal, mechanical and natural, all divided into five categories: playful, dutiful, informational, warning and aggressive.

As smart speakers are rising concerns, we chose to focus on connected speaker to dive into this study. Using a test & learn method involving quick prototyping, we learned to identify the components of a successful interaction when it comes to connected speakers. A key finding was the balance we had to create between all five types of behaviors to reach a refined understanding between the user and the connected speaker.