Toolkits and Making

Tangible, Physical and Embodied Computing is distinct to other areas of HCI literally in its naming adjectives. While its areas of applications are just as manifold as in other HCI areas, it is very specific in its addressed stimulus modality of envisaged interaction. Tangible interaction necessarily has to involve a material, haptic/tactile or embodiment element in its design in order to be called so. Eva Hornecker listed following four defining characteristics in the focus of tangible approaches [3]:

• tangibility and materiality of the interface
• physical embodiment of data
• whole-body interaction
• the embedding of the interface and the users’ interaction in real spaces and contexts

Despite its explicit distinction in its envisaged interaction modality it is still closely related to Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing which also often embed sensors and actuators into physical objects. However, not all ubicomp Systems require Tangible User Interfaces and vice versa. But they definitely share some themes and discussions on such as for example new means of fabrication, the role (and influence) of traditional craft in the development of physical electronic devices and the relevance of the maker movement who share most of the tools with HCI researchers interested in physical interaction.

This is why our conference “Tangible Computing: The Past, Present and Future” features a special session on Toolkits and Making. Its aim is to highlight the most important developments in this field with a special focus on facilitating the individualised fabrication of physical computing objects.

Accepted Papers

In order to find the papers, I went through the tables of content of the Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI) conference proceedings since 2007. Apart from that I also searched for “maker toolkits” on the ACM Digital Libray and looked through papers I had read for a presentation on the “maker movement” in another course. I skimmed the abstracts, introductions and conclusions to filter out the most relevant publications for the session. By checking some of the references I could also find some older papers (before the first TEI conference in 2007) on early development frameworks. In this way I collected 24 potentially relevant pieces of literature from which I eventually chose the following three publications:

1. Saul Greenberg and Chester Fitchett. 2001. Phidgets: Easy Development of Physical Interfaces through Physical Widgets. Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology 3, 2: 209 – 218. http://doi.org/10.1145/502348.502388
2. Ayah Bdeir. 2011. Electronics as Material: littleBits. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction: 3–6. http://doi.org/10.1145/1517664.1517743
3. David Mellis, Sam Jacoby, Leah Buechley, Hannah Perner-Wilson, and Jie Qi. 2013. Microcontrollers as material. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction – TEI ’13: 83. http://doi.org/10.1145/2460625.2460638

I chose these three publications because they give a good overview on the evolution of the toolkit idea and how it has evolved over the past 14 years:

With their Phidgets Greenberg and Fitchett were the first ones to provide a specific hardware toolkit for designers and “everyday programmers” that should assist them on creating new physical user interfaces. They mention also providing an API to program any of the included components while generally hiding implementation details.

Ten years later Ayah Bdeir presented her littleBits concept which simplified the assembling of electronic circuits even more by making it “a matter of snapping small magnets together” [2:397]. Back then littleBits was in a quite early stage of development but since then it has become a successful product being popular in an educational context and for hobby inventors starting off with electronics.

However, simplifying the assembling of electronic circuits comes at the cost of loosing a certain degree of freedom in development for experts. This is why Mellis et al. came up with a so-called untoolkit which uses cheap standard microcontrollers, off-shelf electronic components and craft materials (paper and conductive ink). This opens up the design space again by shifting the toolkit focus away from a set number of pre-defined modules towards a large range of possible materials and different areas for applications. Materials are an important aspect in tangible computing which have been explored in many other recent publications [1,2,4–6]. Therefore I think it is very likely that toolkits which support active material and context exploration and which can be applied to any “fabric of everyday-life” [cf. 7] will be of great relevance in the future of making and the development of new tangible user interfaces.

Additional References

1. Jonas Forsslund, Michael C Yip, and Eva-Lotta Sallnas. 2015. WoodenHaptics : A Starting Kit for Crafting Force-Reflecting Spatial Haptic Devices. Proc. ACM International conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction: 133–140. http://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680595

2. Emilie Giles, Janet Van Der Linden, Walton Hall, and Milton Mk. 2015. Imagining Future Technologies : eTextile Weaving Workshops with Blind and Visually Impaired People. 3–12.

3. Eva Hornecker. Tangible Interaction. Retrieved November 11, 2015 from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/tangible-interaction

4. Ryuma Niiyama, Xu Sun, Lining Yao, Hiroshi Ishii, Daniela Rus, and Sangbae Kim. 2015. Sticky Actuator: Free-Form Planar Actuators for Animated Objects. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction – TEI ’14: 77–84. http://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680600

5. Roshan Lalintha Peiris and Suranga Nanayakkara. 2014. PaperPixels : A Toolkit to Create Paper-based Displays. 498–504.

6. Jasjeet Singh Seehra, Ansh Verma, Kylie Peppler, and Karthik Ramani. 2015. HandiMate. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction – TEI ’14: 117–124. http://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680570

7. Mark Weiser. 1991. The computer for the 21st century. SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communication Review 3, 3: 3–11. http://doi.org/http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/329124.329126