How to Enrich Information Transfer with Lighting Factors in Human Product Interaction

Abstract

Vision is the most dominant sense among the five senses of human in terms of perception. Visual perception is impossible without light. The sun as the biggest natural light source provides our life with light. Lighting, representing equipment for producing light, has been developed for us to visually perceive things in the dark such as night. Together with the improvement of artificial light sources, lighting has been utilized in various purposes for our everyday products. The roles of lighting can be defined as four dimensions: Visibility, Information transfer, Visual aesthetic enhancement, and Emotion induction. LED has been used in diverse electronic appliances in order to transfer information to the user. For example, the indicator of a battery charger shows whether or not the batteries are fully charged with lighting. Although LED lighting can be controlled with several factors, current products in the market have adopted only a few factors of the lighting: for example, turning on or off and changing colors to indicate the status. Therefore, this study aims to explore new interaction to transfer information with lighting factors.

An experiment was designed to identify how lighting factors can be utilized to transfer information. Lighting factors were determined for the experiment. Six factors of lighting were defined based on literature review: Intensity, Color, Area, Movement, Texture, and Distribution. There are three types of information in human-product interaction: the information of a user, the product and the environment. Three products were chosen to represent each type of information: blood pressure gauge, external hard disk, and ozone concentration indicator. Three scenarios were given for each product depending on what level of information is necessary for the user. In order to control each factor of lighting experimental devices were made with Arduino and LED lighting. 30 participants were recruited for the experiment. They were invited to places where the products are actually used, and took part in the experiment. A retrospective interview was followed at the end of the experiment with each product.

The data from the experiment was statistically analyzed. According to the results of statistical analysis, lighting factors can play an important role in information transfer. For example, Movement and Color are most effective factor to deliver information, which was in common between three types of product. The other factors of lighting are influential in information transfer depending on particular types of product. The study also revealed the way that lighting factors are selected is related to how urgently the information should be perceived. This implies that lighting is a useful way to intuitively and fast deliver information to people. However, it is also found out that dazzling lighting is not preferable in case that the information is neither important nor urgent to perceive. Therefore, a conclusion was drawn that lighting is an effective means to transfer information. This study will help designers understand the roles of lighting factors in information transfer and furthermore develop products with lighting that people love to use.