Exploring semantics of movement in context

Industrial Design is concerned with the design of intelligent products and services. When designing these products and services, emotional mediation could be a key aspect in intelligent behavior [2]. In the field of industrial design not much attention has been paid to expressing emotions through movement. Because of this the potency of movement as message carrier and the language of movement were the topic of research. This evoked two questions: Does the addition of movement to objects enrich/enforce the emotional message of the objects? How does a context influence the emotional message of an object? In order to find the answer to these two questions, five vending machines were built. These machines were expressive in their movement and were meant for a specific context. The objects were created using the following idea generation techniques: collages, acting out, tinkering and 4D Sketching [1]. Finally a user test was committed to measure the strength of the message with and without movement. The difference between the strength of the message when the object is in its context and when it is not, was also tested.The result of this test shows an apparent relation between the addition of movement to a static object and an increase of the strength of its emotional message. The presence of the moving object in its accompanying context does not have a relation, which is as apparent as the addition of movement. One must say though that the addition of a context and movement to an object still has a significant effect, showing that the presence of a context certainly hasn't got negative effects. With the results of this research, hopefully attention will be drawn to the importance of movement in objects that mediate a certain message.