Navimation: A Sociocultural Exploration of Kinetic Interface Design

Digital products are an increasingly important part of our culture and are linked to activities at work, play and leisure. Many of these activities happen through screen-based interfaces, which thus play an important role in activating and engage people in their daily lives. Screen-based, visual movement is one increasingly prominent features of mobile phones, computer games, operating system and websites. This dissertation presents’ kinetic interface ‘as a key tool for analyzing screen-based digital product that is characterized by visual movement. Of several concepts that have been introduced to understand kinetic interfaces, ‘navigation’ refers to navigation actions associated with movement.

Screen-based interfaces are product-designed and must be designed by nokon. Interface design plays an important role in shaping opinions and activities that are possible via digital product. There is a deficit design research and literature that take the lead characteristic of kinetic interface. How can we understand the use of motion in kinetic interfaces, andWhat are the characteristics and communicative potential of such interfaces?How can we investigate such a phenomenon that is continuously underdevelopment, in and through design? To understand these new possibilities it is need for studies that focus on the kinetic interface as one media and cultural object in itself, and acknowledges that these are situated in social and cultural contexts.

This dissertation contains three published research texts, of which two reports on my own design experiments that have been performed together with various partners before a major research project called RECORD. In addition, one meta reflection (‘mantle’) presented to place and build on these the publications. By using ‘research through design’, the study combines text analysis and text construction through experimental design production.New analytical concepts and concepts are generated by combining analysis and design; these concepts are necessary both to understand and design kinetics interface.

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