Interact

Make your everyday interactions with children intentional and purposeful with these steps: Be Present, Connect, and Extend Learning.

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

The four-volume set LNCS 8117-8120 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2013, held in Cape Town, South Africa, in September 2013. The 55 papers included in the second volume are organized in topical sections on E-input/output devices (e-readers, whiteboards), facilitating social behaviour and collaboration, gaze-enabled interaction design, gesture and tactile user interfaces, gesture-based user interface design and interaction, health/medical devices, humans and robots, human-work interaction design, interface layout and data entry, learning and knowledge-sharing, learning tools, learning contexts, managing the UX, mobile interaction design, and mobile phone applications.

This work brings together papers written by researchers and practitioners actively working in the field of human-computer interaction. It should be of use to students who study information technology and computer sciences, and to professional designers who are interested in User Interface design.

Accompanying DVD contains filmed interviews with many of the designer/inventors in the book.

A new approach to interaction design that moves beyond representation and metaphor to focus on the material manifestations of interaction. Smart watches, smart cars, the Internet of things, 3D printing: all signal a trend toward combining digital and analog materials in design. Interaction with these new hybrid forms is increasingly mediated through physical materials, and therefore interaction design is increasingly a material concern. In this book, Mikael Wiberg describes the shift in interaction design toward material interactions. He argues that the “material turn” in human-computer interaction has moved beyond a representation-driven paradigm, and he proposes “material-centered interaction design” as a new approach to interaction design and its materials. He calls for interaction design to abandon its narrow focus on what the computer can do and embrace a broader view of interaction design as a practice of imagining and designing interaction through material manifestations. A material-centered approach to interaction design enables a fundamental design method for working across digital, physical, and even immaterial materials in interaction design projects. Wiberg looks at the history of material configurations in computing and traces the shift from metaphors in the design of graphical user interfaces to materiality in tangible user interfaces. He examines interaction through a material lens; suggests a new method and foundation for interaction design that accepts the digital as a design material and focuses on interaction itself as the form being designed; considers design across substrates; introduces the idea of “interactive compositions”; and argues that the focus on materiality transcends any distinction between the physical and digital.

'Interact' is one of the most comprehensive communication textbooks available in the market. Written for professionals, it can be used as a self-help book or as a classroom text. Using the author's extensive teaching experience in Southeast Asia, the book explains concepts in lucid language, providing numerous professional scenarios, cases, and examples. The book has eight extensive chapters. While the first chapter provides the much-needed foundation in communication skills, the following chapters deal with listening skills, confidence-building, networking strategies, presentation skills, and management of conversations. Each chapter provides in-depth discussions and provides ample practice material for professionals to hone their skills.The book is based on materials and cases used in numerous classes over several years in a number of contexts and countries. It grew from the feedback received by several students, professionals, and educators. The richness of this feedback is evident in all sections of the book.

An investigation of interactivity, interfaces and their design, and the webs of complex interactions that result. We are surrounded by interactive devices, artifacts, and systems. The general assumption is that interactivity is good—that it is a positive feature associated with being modern, efficient, fast, flexible, and in control. Yet there is no very precise idea of what interaction is and what interactivity means. In this book, Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman investigate the elements of interaction and how they can be defined and measured. They focus on interaction with digital artifacts and systems but draw inspiration from the broader, everyday sense of the word. Viewing the topic from a design perspective, Janlert and Stolterman take as their starting point the interface, which is designed to implement the interaction. They explore how the interface has changed over time, from a surface with knobs and dials to clickable symbols to gestures to the absence of anything visible. Janlert and Stolterman examine properties and qualities of designed artifacts and systems, primarily those that are open for manipulation by designers, considering such topics as complexity, clutter, control, and the emergence of an expressive-impressive style of interaction. They argue that only when we understand the basic concepts and terms of interactivity and interaction will we be able to discuss seriously its possible futures.