From Aug 11^th to Aug 16^th, I was invited to participate and give a 1 hour talk on our conceptual framework of Blended Interaction at the SummerPIT event of Aarhus University in Denmark (http://pit.au.dk/news-events/events/upcoming-events/summerpit-2014/schedule/). This great event was organized by the Centre for Participatory IT (PIT), the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI), and the centre of Digital Urban Living (DUL) at Aarhus University.

It was an intense five day programme (more like a small conference with a lot of workshops) starting with very inspiring talks about participation and participatory design for urban spaces and interactions. I particularly liked the talk by Martijn de Waal from the University of Amsterdam about urban imaginaries of the 1950s in Rotterdam (Pendrecht by Lotte Stam-Beese) and the 1960s in London (Plug-in city by Archigram) and what we can learn from their visions of a “republican” vs. “libertarian” city for our future sustainable, connected, and “smart” cities.

My talk was more about concrete problems of interaction design and how the framework of Blended Interaction, which I developed together with my former advisor Harald Reiterer at the University of Konstanz, might help to support design decisions. In particular I described the cognitive mechanisms that can explain when an interaction is perceived as “natural” or “intuitive” by its users or not, similar to our journal article on Blended Interaction from last year (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00779-013-0725-4). There was a lot of interesting feedback and in-depth discussions about the topic and I am looking forward to follow up activities with my great Danish hosts, Kim Halskov, Susanne Bødker, Peter Dalsgård, Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, Henrik Korsgaard and many more…