Designing for Physical-Virtual Activities

Computers, embedded in the “background” as well as more obtrusive artefacts (e.g. PCs, PDAs, cellular phones), play an increasingly important role in human activity. However, there are still things that most people would prefer to do “off-screen” in the physical (real) world, such as having parties, reading long text documents, or spending vacation. I argue that there exists a class of activities that are neither physical or virtual, but “physical-virtual” [2]. People frequently do parts of an activity in the physical world (e.g. proof-reading a text document under construction) and parts in the virtual world (e.g. adjusting paragraphs within “the same” document in a word processing environment). This behaviour is likely to become more common. Hence, future environments should be designed with such physical-virtual activities in mind.