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An ecology of tangible interaction

Published: 16 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Tangible and embedded interaction is a fancy way of saying that we make things. We make tools that people handle, use and abuse. We make displays and devices that fill space draw attention, and (sometimes) deliver information. At the center of all of our work is the practice of making things.
Despite that fact, many tangible and embedded interaction practitioners aren't trained in a tradition of making things. Much of the research in this field grows out of computer and information sciences, human-computer interaction, and other fields with less tangible practices. If anything, tangible interaction grew out of a perceived lack of physicality in computing. In order to get things made, we've drawn on a number of practices with a deeper knowledge of manufacturing and fabrication: art, performance, industrial design, and the garment industry, to name a few.
This is a fairly young field, and much of the work still consists of experiments, individual art works, and bespoke items designed for exhibits, special events, or research projects. For the most part, we haven't given much thought to what tangible interaction means at an industrial scale, even though we all have fantasies of a world filled with intelligent, computation-enabled things.
What we haven't yet considered is what happens to all of those intelligent, computation-enabled things when they've outlived their utility. Part of the reason we haven't considered it much is because and because the practices of fabrication from which we've borrowed haven't given it a lot of thought either. Manufacturing has traditionally been a one-way street.
In "Shaping Things", Bruce Sterling put forth the idea that we could think of disposal and reuse of goods as an information design problem. Drawing on the work of entrepreneurs like Ray Anderson, many interaction design programs have begin teaching service design, thinking about the things we make not as goods to be bought, but as services to be leased. I'd like to propose that we also think about the end of our things' lives as a tangible interaction design problem. In this talk, I'll look at some assumptions about how we make interactive things individually and at scale, and propose a few places we might begin making changes.

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TEI '09: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction
February 2009
407 pages
ISBN:9781605584935
DOI:10.1145/1517664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Microsoft Research (USA)
  • Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK)
  • Nokia (Finland)
  • Microsoft Hardware (USA)

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 February 2009

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