Peripheral interaction : why interaction designers should be inspired by everyday attention management

Everyday life is full of simultaneous activities. For example, we walk around, fiddle with a pen, think about our schedule for the day, while also being aware of the things going on around us. Nowadays interactive devices such as smart phone play an important, but often needlessly obtrusive role in our everyday routines. This can be prevented when interaction with these devices would require less of people’s attention. Activities that do not require focused attention are a common part of our everyday interactions with the world around us, but are very rare in our usage of computing devices. This paper discusses why that is the case, and explores how ‘peripheral interactions’, which require minimum attention, could be facilitated by rethinking the interaction design of interactive devices.