Natural interactions, such as those based on gesture input, feel intuitive, familiar, and well-suited to user abilities in context, and have been supported by extensive research. Contrary to the conventional mainstream, we advocate for non-natural interaction design as a transformative process that results in highly effective interactions by deliberately deviating from user intuition and expectations of physical-world naturalness or the context in which innate human modalities, such as gestures used for interaction and communication, are applied-departing from the established notion of the "natural," yet prioritizing usability. To this end, we offer four perspectives on the relationship between natural and non-natural design, and explore three prototypes addressing gesture-based interactions with digital content in the physical environment, on the user's body, and through digital devices, to challenge assumptions in natural design. Lastly, we provide a formalization of non-natural interaction, along with design principles to guide future developments.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713459
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)