Do you think what I think? Strategic ways to design product-human conversation

This contribution vets into Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) and objects’ smart attitudes as emerging contemporary practices. We investigate and discuss the process behind the design and implementation of a product conceived following an idea of intuitive, gesture-based interaction, unpacking and critically analyzing how TUIs are perceived by users. We analyze what it means to experience artifacts whose interactions are triggered by an interface embedded in an object apparently static, but actually technologically augmented and interactive. Through a specific case study, we unfold the results from a qualitative inquiry conducted on a community of prosumers revealing how such interfaces can be misleading. Emerged design issues became challenges for designers and researchers, in a strategic, designerly-ways-of-knowing logic, which led to improving the product keeping into consideration users’ expectancies and their actual interactions/behaviors with the product. In conclusion, we reflect on how designers can benefit from extrapolating users’ habits and cognitive processes from data, in order to be strategically instrumental in defining future design implementations, features, products, services, and even systems.Keywords: Tangible User Interfaces, IoT, interaction design, user centered design, user behaviour, design process, gesture-based interaction, embodied interface