HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book is divided into roughly four parts. Although certainly you can read the book straight through, you don't have to. I recommend that everyone start with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 just to provide a background for what comes later.
The next section, comprising Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, is meant to be used as reference material, mostly when you're designing or are in the process of designing. The patterns show how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past.
Chapter 5 through Chapter 7 are about the process of design, from documentation to prototyping to communicating what the product does to its audience. You also can use these chapters for reference as necessary.
Chapter 8 takes a look at future trends in this subject—a future that gets closer and closer every day. It was, after all, only six years ago that the gestural interfaces in Minority Report were science fiction, and now we can see them being deployed everywhere. "The future is here," as William Gibson famously noted. "It's just not evenly distributed."
Designers can flip through the appendix for inspiration, especially when creating free-form gestural interfaces.