Supporting configurability in a mixed-media environment for design students

In many environments, the landscape of space and artefacts is evolving and changing with the tasks at hand. Integrating digital media and computation in these environments has to take into account the fact that people will configure space functions and tools according to the situation, organising use in unexpected ways. In this article, we present and discuss how the issue of configurability is dealt with, in a series of field trials with design students. The aim of these trials was to construct, for architecture and interaction design students, a mixed-media environment for inspirational learning. The results include physical infrastructure in space and in furniture as integral parts of the interaction technology and the creation of composite representations called “mixed objects‘’, which blend digital and non-digital media in one design artefact. Configurability has to be supported at different levels (infrastructures, artefacts, functions) and across the physical and digital realms.