Oral Digital
The Design of Intraoral Machine Interfaces and Supporting Multisensory Design Frameworks
This PhD thesis proposes theoretical and practical research of Intraoral Machine Interfaces in the field of Interaction Design and HCI.
We experience digital systems predominantly through modalities that exploit our innate strengths in hand-dexterity and vision. The Cortical Homunculus, a sensorimotor mapping of the brain, is an oft-cited image in HCI literature to justify the various hand-eye modalities in Embodied Interaction frameworks. Yet, despite the oversized lips and tongue of the Homunculus, we have neglected the mouth in the design of human-machine interfaces. We experience our world through oral exploration in infancy and gain great pleasure through gustation as adults, but there is an untold number of radical sensory experiences together with cognitive and physical augmentations waiting to be discovered.
Both design and scientific approaches will be employed in this thesis. The scientific aspects include contextualisation and summary of existing knowledge and basic research to ascertain currently unknown neurophysiological measures related to tactile acuity in the mouth, variations in the dexterity of the tongue and the diverse impacts of sensory integration in gustation. This knowledge is relevant to a number of disparate fields and should be investigated and published with methodologies that are valid outside of purely design contexts.
The empirical evidence gathered will support the development of an expanded framework for multisensory design and specific guidelines for the design of Intraoral Machine Interfaces. The guidelines and framework will be further developed and validated through the practical component of this thesis, in participatory workshops and in the creation of novel prototypes in case studies with expert users in performance as well as novice users in interactive gustatory experiences.