In The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill Philip Battin applies some existing ideas around progressive disclosure and Flow to tech gadgets:

User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account. But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user experiences.

Philip proceeds with an example of how such a model could work for a Samsung E8005 SmartTV. We’ve applied these principles in traditional software design for a long time, but it’s interesting to think about how it could be used to improve the design of physical gadgets.