4.2 Phy-dig-world principles

1. The design of software (digital world) should be inspired by the design of physical world

The physical world has a longer history and bigger scope of fields, so there is the bigger collection of tools and artifacts. From the history of the digital world development, we can see many examples on how physical world has informed the design of digital world.

2. The innovative ideas that have been widely applied in the digital world should be transformed into physical world, especially when

a) the digital world is not desirable for the reasons such as -- for maintaining the sensory and touching system, digital simulation replaces too much of the physical world

b) it is not feasible to replace physical world with digital world because the cost problem, for example, e-learning is not feasible in places where there are not computers.

Some innovations generated in digital world can be transformed for improving physical world For example, when designing the navigation inside a shopping mall, we can borrow a lot from a good website navigation system. Another example is: some interactive functions can be embedded in paper-books.

3. The mixed world should be a trend in the future. If so, we can make best use of the affordances provided by both worlds, and avoid the constraints. This principle has been applied in children’s products, and should be applied more in other products too.