Structured Guidelines to Support the Design of Haptic Displays

There are a number of motivations for developing guidelines for haptic display. Guidelines can summarize accumulated knowledge in a domain and they can help to hide complexity from the designer. Guidelines can also support the designer by directing the design process and assisting them with design decisions. Another motivation behind using guidelines is to improve the quality of final designs and to communicate and encourage reuse of good design solutions. Finally guidelines can assist in the evaluation of the design outcomes. However the design process is complex and a designer must work at many levels, sometimes concerned with high-level perceptual design issues and at other time immersed in very detailed design decisions concerned with implementation strategies. To be useful guidelines must assist the designer at all levels. This can lead to large collection of guidelines and this can result in the additional problem of how to index the guidelines to allow eth designer to find the appropriate guideline in an efficient way. This paper describes a collection of haptic guidelines taken from the MS-Guidelines. These guidelines were created to support designers of multi-sensory display. These guidelines are structured using the MS-Taxonomy. This framework acts as an index to allow designers to quickly find the guidelines that are relevant to their current decision making. This paper describes the motivation behind developing guidelines and them provides a number of examples relevant to haptic display. for designers to move between sensory modalities. For example, a designer of visual displays is required to learn new concepts if they wish to become proficient with haptic or sound displays.