Designing Tangible User Interfacesto Support Participation

Tangible User Interfaces are of increasing interest in research and are beginning to showtheir potential for practical applications. Due to the differences from Virtual Reality systemsand traditional WIMP interaction via monitor, mouse and keyboard, established designknowledge from these areas often does not transfer onto tangible interfaces. Hardware andsoftware need to be designed as a well-integrated unit, necessitating more than justgraphics, colourful icons, and clear navigation. Interaction with a tangible interface includesthe physical, graspable look and feel, issues of parallelism in the interface, and whatrepresentational characteristics are used. Thus in addition to the challenge of the lack ofstandard design solutions and patterns, many entirely new design issues need to beexplored. In addition, tangible interfaces show great potential for supporting collaborativesituations (e.g. in participatory design), necessitating a different approach to design itself.These aspects affect both the resulting design (in terms of design recommendations and interms of “good“ design examples) and the process of design (user participation,assessment and evaluation of systems)....