What do Objects Mean?: Early Tangibility in and around Interval Research

Abstract

How can designers benefit from the physical and symbol-using practices that define people? Projects in and around Interval Research Corporation explored tangibles in audio, video and physical token-based computation. Four endeavors clarify what happens offscreen when participants play and collaborate. Understanding deeper issues of on- and offscreen distinctiveness, representation and embodiment is of interest, we maintain, because our current understanding of tangible design has undersold one core virtue of TUIs: tangible computing enables hardware/software systems that are non-isolating. When people are not isolated from the physical world, or from other people, they can rely on a supportive environment to help them manage confusingly large sets of objects and referents, and to share the knowledge with large sets of others. This very human part of computer interaction, we submit, gives rise to language-like structure, games, sorting, stealing, and more. If we let it, it could fundamentally change our relationship to the computer as we design new interfaces for the increasing number of computerized objects around us.