Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

Half the team has been up in Vancouver at Interaction ‘09, where interaction designers meet to learn and get inspired. While they were off there learning (and discovering that Jennifer Tidwell learns from our patterns while writing her new book), I kicked off our new project.

You may know that the University of Kansas now has an interaction design program. This semester, Little Springs Design is working with a student group from that program to explore the question, “what gestures are natural?” We’re wanting to better understand gestures beyond tap, pinch, flick, shake.

Today was the launch meeting. I got some thought-provoking interaction design conversation, right here in Lawrence. I think the most important things I got out of the discussion are:

1. Speech and gesture are both methods of communication, inseparable from language and thought.


2. Buttons (including keyboard and mouse) and tapping communicate an extremely small amount of information (x, y, and 1).


3. Speech and gestures naturally communicate far more.


4. Design for speech and gestures should communicate more, not just replicate taps or button presses.

We also all have some reading. The one I’m looking forward to the most is Gesture and Thought, which looks pretty deep and thought-provoking. I also ordered Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think which may be more important.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Design, Devices, Mobile applications, Mobile web, Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.