Output details

Design and Physicality – Towards an Understanding of Physicality in Design and Use

This output is a chapter in Volume 2 of Designing for the 21st Century. Contributions were only invited from recipients of RCUK’s Design for the 21st Century funding. The authors were invited to contribute because of the Design for Physicality (DEPtH) project, a two year £270K project in partnership with Lancaster University. DEPtH’s outputs included two international workshops on theoretical aspects of physicality, a practitioner focused design workshop on the subject, a special issue of Interacting with Computers Journal, four journal papers and six conference outputs. The chapter presents the results of the entire DEPtH project and describes key findings on physicality’s importance, including how physicality might be ‘designed in’ before prototyping (through so called Physigrams) and how physical materials affect a designer’s processes. Physicality research is building to maturity now but in 2006, when DEPtH’s 1st International Workshop on Physicality took place, the topic was little considered. The partnership responsible for the work in this output was at the core of the development of a new international community, the relevance of which is evidenced by the engagement it attracted from the international academy and high end industry (e.g. HP Labs and Microsoft Research). This level of interest continues, for example invitations made to Gill to give lectures at TU Berlin (2011), Lancaster University (2012) and The Cardiff Scientific Society (2014).