Interaction-Related Properties of Interactive Artifacts

Paper i proceeding, 2011

Over the years, several attempts have been made to describe properties of interactive artifacts and/or interaction. However, these attempts tend to describe more than one aspect, e.g. combining artifact properties with aspects of the user’s experience and/or with aspects that arise in use. Or, authors have focused on a small subset of qualities, or very overarching or very domain-specific qualities. This is an attempt to describe only interaction-related properties of interactive artifacts in themselves, i.e. explicitly focusing on what can actually be inscribed into an interactive artifact (as opposed to what the user may experience, or what may happen during interaction). The aim has been to extend the interaction designer’s vocabulary, providing a means for discussing, analyzing and comparing the interactive aspects of things. The collection of properties is comparably extensive; it contains 30 operties related to six different categories: Interaction; Expression; Behavior; Complexity; Time and Change; and Users. It can be used in several ways – to analyze and discuss properties of an artifact, as a checklist during design, and lastly as a design tool – what happens if we start out with an artifact and then change the attributes?