Recently I came across a white paper of Alessandro Valli, Director of Natural interaction at iO. It was exciting to read it, as it’s exactly what I’m trying to achieve with the Digital Volvelles 2.0.
Like Alessandro Valli I think about interaction as something intuitive that follows human perception rather than letting them artificially learn new ways to perceive and act. He argues that people naturally communicate through gestures, expressions and movements.
Interactive information designers should engage the users into a natural dialogue with other users, information or objects. Designers and technologists translate complexity into simplicity. As Alessandro Valli states in his white paper: ”The key assumption here is that people are meant to interact with technology as they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life, as evolution and education taught them to do”.
Another term I came across is “CALM TECHNOLOGY”, which aims to reduce the stress of information overload by letting the user select what information is at the center of their attention and what information is peripheral. I couldn’t describe better what Digital Volvelles is about! The term was coined by Mark Weiser, chief technologist, and John Seeley Brown, director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab. Xerox Park and its members were really way ahead of everyone and everything. They thought, that calm technology won’t only relax the user but by moving the unneeded information to the edge of the interface, allow more information to exist there, ready for selection when needed.
Exactly what we need with the ever growing common and fluent knowledge.
Melanie
Johannes