Hardware interface design

Dieter Rams, and by extension Braun, produced minimal yet tactile hardware interfaces for a variety of products such as this Braun T1000CD.

The Teenage Engineering OP-1 combines a mixture of hardware buttons, knobs, and a color-coded OLED display.

An iPod, an iconic & revolutionary hardware interface that re-imagined the jog wheel.

Hardware Interface Design is a transdisciplinary design field that shapes the physical connection between people & technology. The development of hardware interfaces as a field is both unique and budding and continues to mature as more and more things around us connect to the internet and operate with grander digital implications.

Profession

Hardware interface designers have the sensibility of a designer, ingenuity of an engineer, the ability to converse fluently with creative and technical teams, and a limitless passion for learning and tinkering with unproven and cutting edge technologies and user interaction models. By drawing upon the fields of industrial design, interaction design, and electrical engineering hardware interface designers are able to transcend the typical boundaries of each respective field in order to prototype and invent physical interfaces that feel, sound, and behave beautifully.

While glossy touchscreens have their time & place, so do knobs, buttons, sliders, and switches in the grander toolset of hardware interface design. These all then culminate to answer one simple, driving question during the job: what do we want people to feel, when using technology?

Examples

An example of a hardware interface could include a remote control, kitchen timer, control panel for a nuclear power plant or even the cockpit of an aircraft.

Another example is the computer mouse. It combines hardware interface staple features such as buttons and a scrolling wheel with an innovative two-dimensional motion tracking laser. Dragging the mouse over a flat surface and have a pointer moves on the screen accordingly. There is a very clear relationship about the behaviors shown by a system with the movements of a mouse.

See also

• Interaction design
• Interface design
• Industrial design
• Kinetic user interface
• User experience design
• User-centered design
• Tangible User Interface
• Organic User Interface
• Service design
• Usability