Interactions between the physical and the digital have become increasingly ubiquitous. They are particularly challenging to visualize and illustrate, as they usually unfold over time and space and involve multiple devices, locations, services, and actors. Traditional approaches to sketching user experiences and storyboarding fall short of clearly illustrating how meaningful relationships between people, things, technology, and places are created when they are consistently transitioning from physical spaces into digital spaces and back again. To address this gap, the pictorial showcases how a design framework based on blending theory informs our illustrative best practices and techniques for Art Directing Blended Experiences. The pictorial further discusses the opportunities and challenges of this narrative sketching technique to help designers further explore and capture the essence of how things, relationships, people, and change weave together new personal social spaces and deeper meanings of physical place.

Abstract This paper focuses on interaction across and between the physical/digital divide. We use blending theory to design for these situations, otherwise known as conceptual integration. Initially, this paper offers a discussion of the literature around blends. From this literature, we applied Benyon’s (Benyon, 2014) proposition of conceptual integration in mixed reality spaces (Blended Spaces) to consider interactions with the digital that complement the physical. We investigated blended spaces in partnership with undergraduate students during a live theatre festival. Our collaborators designed applications that applied blending principles, employing techniques drawn from speculative design. Outputs consist of speculative, narrative storyboards that use data gathered directly from stakeholder interviews and over 380 festival visitors. Our work led us to propose reworking Blended Spaces into a model that novice designers could easily conceive and apply. The work we conducted highlighted the need to consider user transitions from physical to digital and back again and highlighted the experiential nature of this type of interaction.

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial.

The increasing ubiquity of interactions as a mix between digital content and physical objects and spaces, brings about new challenges for designers. There is a need to embed digital systems in physical places, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. They do not consider how designers produce new digital and physical experiences that work harmoniously to provide new forms of engagement. To address this, we illustrate the constructs of blended experiences and how they can be used in the context of bridging green spaces between different countries. We propose the idea of blended experiences and offer a framework of constructs and techniques that can help designers work in this emerging area of design.

This one-day workshop explores how playful interaction can be used to develop technologies for public spaces and create temporal experiences.

This is a demonstration of a Minecraft facsimile of Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh. With the cooperation of primary school children we developed a mixed reality game employing Minecraft. Our aim is to investigate attachment to virtual space and the use of make-believe to manage this.