Robust Unconventional Interaction Design and Hybrid Tool Environments for Design and Engineering Processes

This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support designers and engineers in the early-phases of ideation and conceptualization stages of design and engineering processes. The research explores how fluidly and/or congruously technology affords cognitive, emotive, gesture-based shape-and-form transformation and stimulates externalization within a hybrid design tool environment (HDTE). Meta-cognitive, emotive, gestural, sensorial, multi-dimensional interaction through exploration, translation and manifestation within a contextual blended environment is studied to enhance representation, stimulate choice-architecture and foster decision-making. Current and novel hybrid design tool developments and experiments illustrate the promise of hybridization for natural computing and unobtrusive design-tools (HDT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS). Put into perspective; a proposed framework of robust interaction design (IxD), gamification and affective computing (e.g. emotion) to improve and intensify user-experience (UX) and user-engagement (UE) is presented. The paper concludes by considering the allowance for possible novel routes to increase the scope and forging of links on prevailing frames of human-computer interaction (HCI).