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There is a growing concern for design students to gain basic technological knowledge for design in real practice. While there is abundance of tools for creativity, technical information has never been implemented as inspiration for ideas. In this paper, to answer the demand of creativity tools with real practice, we created magic-based inspirational cards that contain technical clues of how each magic effect can be created in products. Two versions of the tools were compared: Magic cards (only illustration of magic effects) and Technical cards (illustration of magic effects with additional technical clues). The tools were evaluated with thirty novice designers in two design sessions. In the first session, they were asked to generate design ideas in a design task. Then a week later, they were divided into three groups, control group, Magic cards, and Technical cards. The experimental groups were asked to use the cards as a source of inspiration and to generate design ideas in the same design task. The ideas generated by the participants were assessed in terms of creativity and intended user experience (UX). The findings show that the use of both types of magic-based cards resulted in significantly higher scores in originality and flexibility of ideation. Also, the use of Technical cards led to significantly higher intended UX scores. The analysis of products’ behaviors (outputs) showed a significant increase of physical outputs when magic-based inspiration is provided. Our study suggested that, for novice design students, the Magic Effects set together with technological clues could enhance creativity in ideation.

In this paper, we propose an unorthodox approach to enhancing creativity and user experience (UX) in product design with a “magic”-based tool. To support the introduction of magic in product interaction design, we created magic-based inspirational cards that show examples of magic effects. The tool was developed in two modalities, a “static” containing card that show illustrations of magic effects, and a “dynamic” containing the same cards plus videos of magic effects. The tools were experimentally tested with 30 novice designers who were asked to use the tools as a source of inspiration and to generate design ideas for a design task. The ideas generated by the participants were assessed in terms of creativity and intended UX. The findings show that the use of magic-based inspiration resulted in significantly more original but less feasible ideas, and that the use of videos led to design ideas that were significantly more “enjoyable” and more “exciting” than the use of cards only. Consequently, we propose guidelines on the use of magic-based inspiration tools for group ideation in order to help design students create original, enjoyable and exciting UX.

The use of tactile senses in mediated communication has generated considerable research interest in past decades. Since massage is a common practice in Asian cultures, we propose to introduce massage-based interactions in mediated communication between people in a close relationship. We designed a device for distant interactive massage to be used during online conversation and we assessed its effect on interpersonal connection with eight pairs of Chinese participants in romantic relationships. All pairs were asked to engage in a conversation, either through a video call or through a massage-assisted video call. The findings showed that the use of the massage device significantly increased the perceived emotional and physical connection between the users. The results also showed a significant increase in the engagement in the massage activity, e.g., total massage time and average force per finger, from positive conversation to negative conversation, demonstrating an evidence of the interplay between audio-visual and haptic communication. Post hoc interviews showed the potential of the massage device for long-distance communication in romantic relationships as well as in parents-children relationships.