Chapter4 Designing with Blends Abstract This chapter describes the conceptual grounding of blending as a design process, giving the potential for the creation of blended reality spaces as interactive environmentswherethephysicaland 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 bridgebetweentheotherwiseunbalancedprocessesofcognitionandactioninmixes 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. Introduction: Combining the Physical and the Virtual Technology creates the virtual world, but itself exists in the physical world – with which the virtual often competes for our attention. Many new interaction styles strongly emphasise a combination of the physical and the virtual, sometimes called mixed reality (Jacob et al. 2007; Chalmers and Maccoll 2003; Rogers et al. 2002). Today, mixed realities of different kinds represent an increasingly prevalent approachtodesigninginteractiveexperiences.Mixedrealityisalsoagrowingobject of study for the HCI research community, as part of a widespread effort to develop viable and more flexible alternatives to WIMP-based GUIs. Many of the broad range of new interfaces developed by HCI researchers are seen as alternatives to the current GUI paradigm and try, in one way or another, to diverge from the WIMP-based approach (Jacob et al. 2008). For example, sensor-based techniques for interacting with virtual entities via the manipulation of physical objects in space havebeenexploredbyseveralresearchers(see Ishii 2008). We have also witnessed the emergence of a wider variety of HCI technologies in products during the last few years, such as those implemented in physical environments equipped with sensors, or in handheld smart phones with more intuitive onscreen interfaces and inbuilt orientation sensors. These and other recent innovations are now gradually penetrating society, and emerge as a growing trend in the HCI literature. Representative examplesfall underthe headingsof augmented ©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 47 J. Waterworth, K. Hoshi, Human-Experiential Design of Presence in Everyday Blended Reality, Human–Computer Interaction Series, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-30334-5_4