Using active haptic feedback in everyday products

This paper focuses on the introduction and design of active haptic feedback in everyday household and office products. Everyday products allow many opportunities to improve interaction. Over time, performance and number of features have been increased, but the interface became hidden and more difficult to use. Active haptic control elements can be used to approximate the richness of traditional mechanical controls and preserve the extensiveness of digital function sets. Previous research in the field of haptic interaction mainly focused on expert tools, and resulted in useful guidelines and available technology. Our research focuses on user involvement, usability, and context of use of everyday products. The meaning of feedback in interfaces of existing products is explored and a design space that describes opportunities for implementing controlled haptic feedback in products is presented. By elaborating five design cases – based on student projects – this design space is explored. Each case study treats a specific aspect of haptic interaction, explains the context of use and presents results from a user test.