A Survey of Natural Design for Interaction

Abstract

The term “Natural Design” has various meanings and applications within and beyond the human-computer interaction community. Yet, there is no consensus on whether it is a relevant design approach or only a descriptive term without profound meaning. We investigated the current understanding and design potential of “Natural Design” for interaction in a systematic literature review. By analyzing and rating 113 papers, we identified 47 relevant papers that applied Natural Design in different contexts. The understanding of the approach changes from nature-related inspirations to context-dependent naturalness based on increasing familiarity or expectations. We present a structured overview of these relevant papers, contribute a systematic Natural Design model for interaction and add 20 implications for applying Natural Design to natural user interfaces, natural interaction, or computation. We identified “Natural Design” as a relevant design approach to create intuitive and embedded interfaces that can profit from related concepts outside human-computer interaction.