Designing for the unexpected: The role of creative group work for emerging interaction design paradigms

Interaction design for new technological environments relies on the tradition of human-computer interaction (HCI). With roots in the 1980s, HCI design paradigms often reflect the setting in which the user is an office worker in front of a desktop computer. As computational power can now be embedded in almost any type of product, the desktop setting has lost much of its relevance as a starting point for interface design. In particular, interfaces for wearable computing challenge designers to look for completely new approaches to interaction design. In this article, we propose a method in which the ideas for new creative forms of interaction design are triggered through panel work. This method draws on an underpinning theoretical framework from structural semiotics that emphasizes the holistic nature of design.