The Tactile Experience

Form

Form is an important element in tangible interaction, as it visually signals and physically embodies functionality, expresses cues for understanding, and provides the script for interaction. Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design focuses on physical embodiment through projects about people’s relationship with objects and systems. Students explore the role and impacts of object forms with the intention of developing artifacts that are useful, usable, desirable, and that exhibit permanence. We encourage our students to look past cosmetic aspects of form to consider objects as communicators that will elicit a continuing dialog with people.

In one exercise, students design a set of simple hand tools that facilitate and express a function. Students structure semantic cues and form language to visually inform the mind, physically engage the body, and guide the hand for interaction (see Figure 2). Drawing inspiration from Neolithic hand tools, they consider body position, movement, ceremony, and utility to guide form development. This exercise is a primer for interaction and subsequent study in the industrial design curriculum that emphasizes the role and impact of form in shaping people’s behavior and experience.

Students are given design
problems that require them
to use physical form to medi-
ate and facilitate interaction.
They develop sensitivity to
form through experiments
with materials and purpose-
ful play. The specimens shown
in Figure 3 engage students in
form development, construc-
tion, and physical manipulation.
Throughout the curriculum, stu-
dents engage with mechanical,
embedded, intelligent, and/or
adaptive systems that encourage
new forms of interaction (see
Figure 4). They learn to use form
language, aesthetics, ergonom-
ics, and the traditional methods
of industrial design in making
interactive products under-
standable and appropriate.

• Figure 3: Top, forms in various materials invite touch and manipulation (Mark Baskinger). The wooden forms were found in a lakeside market in Taiwan. Bottom, “interactables” that encourage form development, construction, and physical manipulation (Mark Baskinger and Jason May).

January + February 2010

interactions

Computing Form connects with computing through sensors and effectors. Sensors provide input. The simplest and cheapest sensor is a switch; today, buttons dominate our interaction with electromechanical products. Well-positioned switches can sense how an object is being held. Sensors abound—for temperature, movement, pressure, force, moisture, chemicals, stretch and strain, and so on. Effectors provide output. Long popular as indicators, LEDs mounted beneath a translucent skin can change an object’s color. And there’s audio: Everything beeps and buzzes, but what do these sounds tell us? We could do so much more with sound design. Motors, too, are effectors, providing motion and other physical action. For example, vibrator motors in cell phones bring a physical quality to digital interaction. Touch and light make a simple and compelling combination: The Hit Me interactive light (see Figure 5) lights up in different patterns, depending on how it is touched or grasped. Less common are effectors such as the nitinol muscles in Greg Saul’s paper robots or the ther-mochromic paint that colors his lamps (see Figure 6).