We live in an increasingly digital world, yet our bodies and minds are naturally designed to interact with the physical. When designing purely physical artefacts we do not necessarily have to understand what it is about their physicality that makes them work – they simply have it. However, as we design hybrid physical/digital products we now have to understand what we lose or confuse by the added digitality; and so need to understand physicality more clearly than before. The Design for Physicality (DEPtH) project set out to develop new insights into our relationship with the physical. The roots of DEPtH lie in the coincidentally convergent interests of two research streams: those of the human computer interaction (HCI) researchers at Lancaster under DEPtH’s Principal Investigator Alan Dix and product design researchers at University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) under Steve Gill (one of the Co-Investigators). The rest of the team were: Hans Gellersen (Co-Investigator), Devina Ramduny-Ellis (Research Associate) and Jo Hare (Research Assistant). Together they were able to muster a wide range of knowledge and experience including product design practice, mathematical modelling, human interface design, ubiquitous computing, lab-based user experiments and social-science methodology.
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