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Interaction design is acknowledged as an important area of study, and more especially of design practice. Hugely popular and profitable consumer devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, are seen as owing much of their success to the way they have been designed, not least their interface characteristics and the styles of interaction that they support. Interaction design studies point to the importance of a user-centred approach, whereby products are in principle designed around their future users' needs and capacities. However, it is the market, and marketing, that determine which products are available for people to interact with and to a great extent what their designed characteristics are. Primitive Interaction Design is based on the realisation that designers need to be freed from the marketplace and industry pressure, and that the usual user-centred arguments are not enough to make a practical difference. Interaction designers are invited to cast themselves as "savages", as if wielding primitive tools in concrete physical environments. A theoretical perspective is presented that opens up new possibilities for designers to explore fresh ideas and practices, including the importance of conscious and unconscious being, emptiness and trickery. Building on this, a set of design tools for primitive design work is presented and illustrated with practical examples. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in interaction design and HCI, as well as practicing interaction designers and computer professions. It will also appeal to those with an interest in psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, design and the future of technology in society.

Ambience is about the meaning of silence that cannot be expressed in words, and ambient interaction is about the perception of it. The present paper discusses three critical and fundamental aspects in the way ambient environments can be meaningfully designed in modern information society; 1) how design can merge that which is difficult to externalize together with that which is easy to externalize, and does so in a fulfilling way; 2) what is the most effective method for arriving at a mythological conclusion that could resolve the conflict between the many opposing forces at play?; and 3) what is "emptiness" based on eastern philosophy perspective, and how it can be applied to designing ambient environment? We shed light on how our thinking of design and information-based society should adapt moving forward by using universal thinking and human consciousness in a new, "primitive" coexistence with modern information technology., Also part of the Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI book sub series (LNISA, volume 12203)

This book explores how our lives and social interactions have become split between two intertwined, but not integrated, realities: the physical and the digital. Our sense of presence in the here and now has become fragmented, and yet earlier design approaches reinforced the problem, rather than leading to improvements. The authors address these issues by laying out a new human computer interaction (HCI) design approach – human-experiential design – rooted in a return to first principles of how people understand the world, both consciously and unconsciously. The application of this approach to the design of blended reality spaces is described in detail. Examples and scenarios of designing them to overcome the problems inherent in a variety of mixed reality settings are provided. Human-Experiential Design of Presence in Everyday Blended Reality will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in interaction design, psychology, HCI and computer application studies, as well as practicing interaction designers and computer professionals. It will also be of interest to communication, media and urban design students, and to all readers with an interest in the technology-mediated future.

Western societies are confronted with a number of challenges caused by the increasing number of older citizens. One important aspect is the need and wish of older people to live as long as possible in their own home and maintain an independent life. As people grew older, their social networks disperse, with friends and families moving to other parts of town, other cities or even countries. Additionally, people become less mobile with age, leading to less active participation in societal life. Combined, this normal, age-related development leads to increased loneliness and social isolation of older people, with negative effects on mental and physical health of those people. In the AGNES project, a home-based system has been developed that allows connecting elderly with their families, friends and other significant people over the Internet. As most older people have limited experience with computers and often special requirements on technology, one focus of AGNES was to develop with the users novel technological means for interacting with their social network. The resulting system uses ambient displays, tangible interfaces and wearable devices providing ubiquitous options for interaction with the network, and secondary sensors for additionally generating carefully chosen information on the person to be relayed to significant persons. Evaluations show that the chosen modalities for interaction are well adopted by the users. Further it was found that use of the AGNES system had positive effects on the mental state of the users, compared to the control group without the technology.

The aim of this chapter is to propose a new way to meaningfully bridge the dichotomy between technological and human concerns in the context of E-health systems. We see 'Design' as having the responsibility to ensure that humans can fulfill themselves in the world of things (or technology). First, this chapter raises issues surrounding human-centered design of E-health, caused by three major dichotomies which create imbalances that have caused a lack of true human-centered-ness: (1) the human-user dichotomy, (2) the virtual-physical dichotomy, and (3) the experiential-practical dichotomy. Second, this chapter reframes a categorization of customer, user, person and human, which allows us to discover new aspects of 'humans' and of true 'Human-centered design'. Third, the concept of Tangible Presence in Blended Reality Space, an emerging integration of HCI concerns and Mediated Presence research, is introduced. Finally, the author proposes a new way of approaching human-centered design, what they call Human-Experiential Design, through which the experiential-practical dichotomy is effectively blended. The author believes that this view will be significantly important in attempts to go a further step in the development of better E-health, capitalizing on seamless combinations of the virtual and the physical in blended reality. Such blends will release human beings from the strain that existing dichotomies bring.

Electronic healthcare technologies support the interaction between patients and health-service providers, institution-to-institution transmission of data, and peer-to-peer communication between patients and health professionals. These technologies promise to deliver significant improvements in access to care, quality of care, and the efficiency and productivity of the health sector.Human-Centered Design of E-Health Technologies: Concepts, Methods and Applications unites researchers and industry practitioners from different disciplines to share their domain-specific knowledge and thereby contribute to a holistic introduction into the area of human-centered design for e-health applications. The knowledge and insights provided in this book will help students, as well as systems designers, to understand the fundamental social and technical requirements future e-health systems have to meet. By providing a well-rounded introduction within one single volume, this book is equally suited as a library reference and upper-level course supplement, but also represents a first-class resource for independent study.

The present paper starts with a crucial discussion about the imbalance between technological and human concerns in the context of human-computer interaction, an imbalance that has arisen partly from the mechanistic aspect and its impact on interaction design. We then introduce the concept of Blended Reality Space, interactive mixed reality environments where the physical and the virtual are seamlessly combined and affect each other. The conceptual grounding and practical examples that illustrate our approach to interaction design are then discussed, adopting a standard figurative representation of blends. This helps understanding the role of blending that meaningfully bridges unbalanced separations between cognition and action, and the physical and the virtual. As a concrete example, the AGNES project, which is aimed at developing “user sensitive home-based systems for successful ageing in a networked society”, is introduced. We believe that the emphasis on ʻbalanceʼ or appropriate blending is very important in the development of better interactive systems for health, capitalizing on seamless combinations of the virtual and the physical in Blended Reality Space.

This research explores where the contextual reality gap emerges in social sharing of knowledge, understanding and experience generated between users (also between a designer and a user) in different contexts. It then examines how this 'contextual reality gap' can be bridged effectively in the sharing of meaning through mediated communication within emergent virtual/physical space, in what we call Blended Reality Space. As a concrete example, we refer to our current project, AGNES, developing User-sensitive Home-based Systems for Successful Ageing in a Networked Society, funded under the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint programme. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework for managing, structuring and composing contexts in designing interactive systems, a new approach we refer to as the Contextual Reality Framework.

Blended Reality Space is our term for an interactive mixed-reality environment where the physical and the virtual are intimately combined ill the service of interaction goals and communication environments aimed at health support and rehabilitation. The present study examines the effect on rated presence and self-presence of three key factors in the way blended realities may be implemented for these purposes. Our findings emphasize the importance of tangibility for presence, but suggest that presence and self-presence are unrelated phenomena. These findings will be incorporated into design principles for our planned work to develop free movement-based interactions for motor rehabilitation as well as blended-reality spaces for collaboration between hospitals, care organizations, and the home.