Touching Materials Visually: About the Dominance of Vision in Building Material Assessment

Designers’ visual way of knowing and working tends to be highly valued in design research. In architecture such an approach is increasingly criticized. Since people experience buildings with all their senses, architects’ visual focus is said to the run the risk of disregarding non-visual aspects. This study focuses on the visual and tactile...

Seeing Signs: On the appearance of manual movements in gestures

This dissertation presents the results of a series of studies on the appearance of manual movements in gestures. The main goal of this research is to increase our understanding of how humans perceive signs and other gestures. Generated insights from human perception may aid the development of technology for recognizing gestures and sign language...

The effects of sensory impairments on product experience and personal well-being

To determine the roles the sensory modalities play in user-product interactions, one modality was blocked during the execution of eight simple tasks. Participants reported how they experienced the products and how they felt during the experiment. Blocking vision resulted in the largest loss of functional information, increased task difficulty...