Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, cilt.36, sa.2, ss.141-163, 2019 (AHCI)
There is growing integration of digital technologies to the physical domain. In this process digital technologies have expanded the expressive characteristics of physical products. However, in this integration, we should also discuss the way that physicality enriches our interactions with digital systems. This paper aims to attend to this discussion through mobile listening experience and explores how embodiment of personal clothing and accessories can enrich the aesthetics of mobile music player interactions. It presents a generative session where participants were asked to rethink and perform particular music player controls through physical manipulation of personal clothing and accessories as well as gestures. The outcomes of the study reveal different examples (to be) followed in the integration of digital technologies with personal clothing and accessories. These examples comprise a variety of approaches ranging from depiction of potential areas on these physical items to attach controls to more complex physical manipulations where their material qualities are used as a means of music player controls. The study demonstrates that the use of personal clothing and accessories as interfaces contributes to both sensorial and intellectual enrichment of music player interactions. The sensorial enrichment can be explained with the interaction possibilities expanded by reinterpretation of physical affordances, use of material properties and use of spatio-temporal relationships. In addition, the intellectual enrichment is achieved with users' construction of meaning through embodied metaphors and representational relationships. The paper finally discusses the practical concerns that are likely to emerge in the interpretation of different approaches presented in the generative session while developing future mobile music player interfaces. The paper also provides design strategies to tackle these concerns. These strategies can be summarised as keeping the underlying embodied metaphors when developing alternatives for physical manipulations that have pre-established functions, defining additional parameters for aesthetics of interaction to prevent accidental controls, increasing the control options to adapt to changes in use context, and integrating physical accessories and clothing into the use scenario to make gestures socially more acceptable.