“Do All that You Know, and Try All that You Don’t…”: Models of Intuitive Interaction

Humans perceive the world not as it is, but as we imagine it. Specifically, we do not process what we perceive in real time. Instead we make irregular updates to a mental model of the world around us, and it is that mental model with which we interact. In order to interact successfully with any environment, we need to have a functional mental model. We created two mental models for use with our S.N.A.R.K. Circuit, mental models that would relieve the user from having to understand complicated details about the interaction. This moved the process to their unconscious and made it more intuitive. The original goal of this project was to induce in the user a mental model of the home as a single entity, by enabling multi-modal interaction and easy transfer between modalities and devices. In order to achieve intuitiveness, we moved the goalposts. Giving voice commands to an invisible major domo, or waving your smart phone like a wand do not reflect normal life, but do reflect interactions that are already well-accepted enough to be intuitive.