Futures of tangible computing

This week our class has been tasked with planning a hypothetical conference on tangible computing, with my group co-chairing a session on the histories and futures of tangible computing. Given that tangible computing is a relatively new academic field (being around 20 years old), many of the researchers who presided over the formation of the subject area are still actively involved in the field today. We therefore wanted to include at least one such luminary figure in our session and chose Hiroshi Ishii who works out of MIT’s media laboratory. We would focus a part of the session around his 2008 paper Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels as it gives a very useful historical perspective on the field. Here Ishii takes us right back to the CUI (command user interface), then the GUI which he argues was a significant improvement over the CUI as it did not require the user to remember and type. He then goes on to essentially argue that whilst GUI’s can do lots of things, they don’t do them all that well! Specifically, he explains that the versatility of GUIs stems from having their output decoupled from the input which allows them to visually represent a broad range of media. However he asserts that GUI’s don’t play to people’s strengths in terms of our abilities to sense and manipulate physical objects. This is where tangible user interfaces (TUIs) comes in. Ishii defines the goal of the TUI as being to ‘empower collaboration, learning, and design by using digital technology and at the same time taking advantage of human abilities to grasp and manipulate physical objects and materials.’  The paper gives examples of lots of applications for TUI interfaces and therefore will make great food for thought for the session’s audience. He also offers the suggestion that tangible objects can be combined with video projections and sound to achieve some of the versatility that GUIs enjoy.

We would then like to present a paper that can bridge the gap between the past and the future. For this purpose we would choose Chu et al.’s paper Mapping Place: Supporting Cultural Learning through a Lukasa-inspired Tangible Tabletop Museum Exhibit. The authors describe a tangible tabletop installation designed to help museum visitor understand how the Lukasa people from Africa create and share stories through the mapping of symbols. Children can use the table to manipulate these symbols and in doing so create and share their own stories.

The final paper in our session would explore the future of TUIs, and we would select Shaer et al.’s Trajectories in TEI: Reflecting on the Evolution of Ideas, Innovators, and Interactions. In this paper the authors reflect on the history of the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions conferences which started in 2007. One of the crux pieces of advice gleaned from the 2012 conference was that researchers should start moving away from a techno-centric approach and towards a human-centric approach. In order to do this interdisciplinary teams would have to be formed. The paper also discusses the role that the conference plays in supporting the next generation of TEI leaders and some of the people that have been given support are profiled. This would be great for getting the people in our session thinking about how we all could support the next generation coming through.