Inner Earth: Towards Interaction Patterns

Inner Earth is a project to develop an online activity set to help children learn and think about what is inside the Earth. The child is taken on a ride in an elevator to the core of the Earth and they stop along the way to undertake certain activities involving plants, sewers, mines, fossils, convection and magma. The system was developed between imedia in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and Questacon: The National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, Australia. Communicating and implementing the project over such a distance was not problematic given the clearly defined roles of each team. The part of the project that required extensive negotiation and redesign was how the user interacts with each activity. Having a common systemic approach to design the interaction tasks, with established guidelines of what works in different situations, would have benefited the design teams. It is for that reason that we propose defining Interaction Patterns based on the design patterns that have been applied to software engineering, web applications, hypermedia and computer games.