Beyond MAYA for game-changing multisensory design

With information technology becoming ever more embedded in our surrounding everyday things, the nature of interactions and the way we experience digitalization is becoming increasingly embodied. Thus, growing effort is placed on examining the multisensory nature of interaction experience. From a design perspective, increased knowledge of how people experience materials and how to design to encourage varying material experiences opens new opportunities for the generation of rich multisensory user experience, and accomplishing game-changing results. In particular, the innovation space opened up by understanding people's material expectations of designs is significant. An experiment (N = 78) was conducted to examine how people appraised materials via touch and sight. There were three groups: sight, touch, and touch and sight. Here, we focus on a task connecting the materials to five design contexts according to appropriate, inventive and inappropriate. Results reveal the potential in harnessing the least expected and desired connections between material and design application, for creating imaginative multisensory experiences.