Toward actuated and responsive environments: designing unobtrusive motions to guide users’ postural behaviors during

Abstract

The scale of dynamic and interactive systems have grown from small objects to furniture- and room-scale. This brings new design opportunities in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) where users’ environments become actuated and responsive as well as users interact with whole-body movements. Considering that the environments change their position, shape, or layout in real-time, the major approach found in the literature has been adapting the environments to users’ varying needs. On the contrary, if environments understand users and know the potential improvements in users’ behaviors, I expect that the future direction is systems guiding users toward the preferred state.

In this dissertation, I investigated actuated and responsive systems that guide users’ behaviors with the motions in their environments. I conducted studies in the context of correcting unhealthy sitting behaviors in users’ workspaces. Studies in ergonomics have shown physical inactivity as a health threat and recommended balanced sitting and frequent posture changes. To trigger such postural behaviors, I moved visual content and body support. I estimated users’ motion detection threshold to design unobtrusive user guidance that does not interrupt users’ primary activities. Throughout the investigation, I sought out to understand the benefits and limitations of unobtrusive user guidance during their activities, the design space, and how users respond to the motions that are under their perception threshold.

Based on the results, my contributions can be summarized as follows: a) I developed the prototypes of actuated and responsive systems that unobtrusively guide users during their activities, b) I share the initial taxonomy of actuated and responsive systems to guide continuous investigations in the field of HCI, and c) I discuss the potential applications and further research subjects to promote systems that guide users for their own good.