Session 3: Toolkits and Making

Tangible interaction includes a variety of perspectives but specifically it refers to the person interactions with digital information through the physical environments. Applications of tangible user interfaces have been developed in a large variety of domains and took many different forms, from simple tokens to task-specific objects. Because of the growth of this interdisciplinary research community the term “Tangible Interaction” has its own conference and is separated from HCI.

According to Dourish, two fundamental and unifying principles of HCI are tangible computing and social computing. Explorations in tangible computing have attempted to capitalise on a new range of skills, the tactile and physical skills that we employ in dealing with the world around us. Research into tangible computing has taken a step back and realised that, while we currently interact with computers through physical objects, we can better exploit our natural skills.

In the Conference of Tangible Computing 2015: The past, Present, and Future, I am co-chairing Toolkits and makings session. The three papers that I have chosen to share are listed below and I have selected them because they are not much new and by reading them I could realize the growing space of interfaces in which physical objects play a central role as both physical representations and controls for digital information.

1. “A Framework Interviewing Tangible Objects, Surfaces, and Spaces” that introduces the ROSS framework which is an integrated application development toolkit that extends across different tangible platforms such as multi-user interactive tabletop displays, full body interaction space, RFID tagged objects and smartphones with multiple sensors.

2. “ A Toolkit for Thinking with Tangibles and connecting Communities” that represents a new toolkit for creating tangible interfaces. By offering graphical command blocks inspired by the scratch programming environment.

3. “ A toolkit for Construction of Real World Interface” that is an old paper published in 2003 discussing how to construct real world interfaces.