Unlocking the expressivity of point lights

Small point lights (e.g., LEDs) are used as indicators in a wide variety of devices today, from digital watches and toasters, to washing machines and desktop computers. Although exceedingly simple in their output - varying light intensity over time - their design space can be rich. Unfortunately, a survey of contemporary uses revealed that the vocabulary of lighting expression in popular use today is small, fairly unimaginative, and generally ambiguous in meaning. In this paper, we work through a structured design process that points the way towards a much richer set of expressive forms and more effective communication for this very simple medium. In this process, we make use of five different data gathering and evaluation components to leverage the knowledge, opinions and expertise of people outside our team. Our work starts by considering what information is typically conveyed in this medium. We go on to consider potential expressive forms -- how information might be conveyed. We iteratively refine and expand these sets, concluding with ideas gathered from a panel of designers. Our final step was to make use of thousands of human judgments, gathered in a crowd-sourced fashion (265 participants), to measure the suitability of different expressive forms for conveying different information content. This results in a set of recommended light behaviors that mobile devices, such as smartphones, could readily employ.