Kinaesthetic thinking: The tacit dimension of interaction design

Designers of computer-based material are currently forced by the available design tools to express interactivity with concepts derived from the logical-mathematical paradigm of computer science. For designers without special training as programmers this represents a barrier. The three psychological experiments presented here indicate that it is possible to express interactive behavior in a more direct fashion by letting the designers compose software from interaction elements with built-in behavior. The resulting “kinaesthetic thinking” of the software designers shows similarities with visual and musical thinking. To be able to support this style of design it might be necessary to rebuild from scratch parts of today's software using simple interactive building blocks. As an illustration, a design tool is presented, based on a pixel-level agent architecture.