Tangible Interface Design
Overview
Tangible Interfaces was invented by Prof. Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Essentially, we are talking about mixing digital information with physical interactions. You can get a good sense of what it means by looking at the projects on their website.
At workplaces, one common thing we have to deal with daily is:is that person I want to talk to interruptible? On the other hand, if we are that person, how can we signal to the others about our status? We designed two tangible artifacts that can be applied to these settings: a door knob and a partition. They are described as follows. Note that these objects today have zero intelligence / digital information on them.
Two projects below:
- Knobly - a tangible doorknob.
- just. enough. shade. - an ambient shade.
Knobly
Knobly is a smart door knob that allows both the inside user (the one that uses the office) and the outside users (those wanting to visit/passing by) to communicate. We hacked our prototype using a modified iDog, Arduino, Processing, and Twitter.
The inside user can change her status via the knob inside (e.g. busy vs. away vs. available), and the outside knob (in the shape of an iDog) will change accordingly - “calm” to mean available, “aggressive” to mean busy (e.g. eyes blinking and changing colors, ear swinging rapidly).
The outside user can “pat” the iDog to signal her visit - the inside user can learn how many visits she receives since last time she checked. For example, she may be on a very long phone call during which 5 people wanted to visit but couldn’t. Or she could be just closing her door and forgot that there are people who wanted to interact with her.
We also linked the system to Twitter so the knob has its own Twitter updates.
just. enough. shade.
jes explores the status approach using another artifact - a office partition / shade. It can be installed at windows of individual offices, or better yet, as a new type of cubicle partition that can “open and close.”
The design space we want to explore here focuses on the fact that when the insider user opens the shade, the real physical space between her and the outside opens up (i.e. she wants to interact as usual). When the shades is not fully open or is closed, then she wants to focus on her own things — this is where we can explore a virtual space to be augmenting the closed shade area. User’s activities, streams can project on the outside shade, and outside users can interact with the inside user (e.g. sending encouragement virtual gifts).
We have a working paper that describes the concept:
