Dimension space for the design of interactive systems within their physical environments

Abstract

This paper introduces a Dimension Space describing the entities making up richly interactive systems. The Dimension Space is intended to help designers understand both the physical and virtual entities from which their systems are built, and the tradeoffs involved in both the design of the entities themselves and of the combination of these entities in a physical space. Entities are described from the point of view of a person carrying out a task at a particular time, in terms of their attention received, role, manifestation, input and output capacity and informational density. The Dimension Space is applied to two new systems developed at Grenoble, exposing design tradeoffs and design rules for richly interactive systems.