Sahil Mathur - Designing for rich interaction design systems


Separating rational design from its expressive potential and immersing people in media is not enough for us to claim that we have designed an overall experiential product. Rather, considering an interactive product or service as a whole system of embodied artefacts brings richness, realism, and inspiration to the human experience. An interactive immersion of such type supports the user's active contextual participation in any given activity, task, or process that can positively impact the quality of work in complex and stressful workplace conditions.

Through this research, I would like to investigate multimodality as an aspect of human-computer interaction in enhancing complex work scenarios and how design system practitioners can utilize users' embodied knowledge to create extended rich design systems and multi-modal direction at these workplaces.

Theoretically, my research would be based on existing research in interaction design, embodied experience, situated awareness, ambient intelligence and human-computer interaction, which will provide directions for the formulation of new ideas, methods, and approaches to creating a rich design system, as well as propose novel ideas from beyond these disciplines. Analytically, my attention would be centered on investigating the interactions between objects, individuals and their work surroundings in ship bridges, following activities and scenarios over time and learnings from these participatory experiences. This means that my interest would be in looking at the implications of human activity, its context and how it helps in the extension of modalities.

The intended impact of this research would be to create a framework for future research on multi-modal interactions within design systems, influencing critical workplace interactions from a practitioner's point of view and influencing design practice by extending modalities as a part of the design system, thereby collectively contributing in making workplace experience richer and creating a space for open innovation in a human-centered way.

Photo: Ocean Industries Concept Lab