Temporality in Interaction Design Chung-Ching Huang School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University 919 E 10 th Street Bloomington, IN 47408, United States huang21@indiana.edu Erik Stolterman School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University 919 E10 th Street Bloomington, IN 47408. United States estolter@indiana.edu ABSTRACT In this paper we argue that temporal aspects of interactions have not yet received enough attention in interaction design research. We find this lack of concern to negatively influence both interaction design practice as well as research. This paper is therefore a first attempt to explore and examine potential techniques that might be usable to describe and analyze temporality in interactions. We first discuss some existing research when it comes to temporal issues in interaction design research. Then we explore and propose some alternative ways to examine and describe temporal patterns of interaction. We propose two forms of descriptions that feature both visual and verbal components. We present a small study where these tools are used. Based on these studies we discuss in more detail the benefits of the proposed approach and how the approach con be developed and refined. We end with a brief discussion on the potential benefits of developing a greater awareness of and tools for studying temporality in the field. Categories and Subject Descriptors A.0 [GENERAL]: Conference Proceedings H.5.2: User interfaces, User-Centered design. General Terms Design Keywords Temporal issues, Analytical Description 1. INTRODUCTION Interaction design is as a field of both research and practice concerned with the relationship between humans and artifacts. This relationship is usually described as a series of events and actions. However, understanding interaction in this fashion sometimes misses the full richness of an interaction. Furthermore, not every interaction happens in exactly the time sequence and time span that the designers originally intended and based their design on. Users pay attention, get involved, and interact with artifacts differently all the time. As shown in Fig. 1, there are many complex usages in the real world and researchers in many cases only focuses on special tasks in a particular moment, neglecting the impact from previous activities also the ongoing influence of the users’ later behaviors. Figure 1. Usage scenarios and research framing This research is concerned with the notion of temporal issues in interaction design practice and research. There are several reasons for this concern. The basic reason is that temporality, even though a core aspect of interaction is not paid enough attention in the field. We find this lack of concern to negatively influence both interaction design practice as well as research. For instance, design practitioners propose ideal scenarios of usage, and fail to recognize that there are diverse and complex usage patterns related to temporality among end users. In research on the other hand we often see design researchers pay full attention to an interaction session only when a user is fully focused on a specific task, instead of seeing the interaction as a trajectory along a time line (see Fig. 1). In many cases, interaction designers and researchers describe an interaction just like they would tell a story. When people tell their own story, they describe the story details as a sequence of continuous events. In interaction design practice, spoken or written languages are definitely the most common descriptive tools used to catch temporal qualities. Moreover, sketches, graphic scenarios, flowcharts and diagrams are also widely used to present continues events. Through chronologically juxtaposing moments where a user and an artifact coexist in space and time, designers define the temporality of a proposed interaction. Those descriptions, however, focus often only on some major events (particular sessions) during an interaction and thereby Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DPPI '11, Jun 22-25 2011, Milano, IT Copyright (c) 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1280-6/11/06... $10.00