4. Designing with Blends

This chapter describes the conceptual grounding of blending as a design process, giving the potential for the creation of blended reality spaces as interactive environments where the physical and the virtual are seamlessly combined. The link between blends and the human-experiential approach to interaction design is then presented and discussed, using a standard figurative representation of the blending process. This helps us to understand the role of blending in creating a meaningful bridge between the otherwise unbalanced processes of cognition and action in mixes of the physical and the virtual. The importance of balance as appropriate blending in the development of better interactive systems for a range of application areas is stressed.