Tangible Media

See: Media Lab at MIT

Hiroshi Ishii

Definition

Tangible media, or tangible user interfaces (TUIs), give physical form to digital information — making bits graspable, so that a person manipulates data by handling objects rather than by pointing at representations of them on a screen.

Origins

The programme was established by Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer at the MIT Media Lab in the paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms" (CHI 1997), and pursued since by the Tangible Media Group.

Ishii's motivating observation is that the graphical user interface confines interaction to a narrow channel — one pointer, one flat rectangle — while human beings possess an enormous, highly trained repertoire for handling physical objects: two hands, tool use, weight and texture judgement, spatial arrangement, peripheral awareness. The GUI, on this reading, is not a triumph of interface design but a severe reduction of human capability that has become so normal it is invisible.

The group's stated ambition is to move from "painted bits" — pixels behind glass — to "tangible bits."

Key Projects

• metaDESK and Tangible Geospace (1997). Physical icons ("phicons") placed on a table manipulate a projected map; moving a model of a building moves and rotates the map beneath it.
• musicBottles. Glass bottles whose opening and closing releases and stops streams of music, using a familiar object's existing affordance as the entire interface.
• Pinwheels and Ambient Room. Ambient displays that render information as air movement, light and sound in the periphery — the direct ancestor of much calm technology practice.
• Topobo and Siftables. Constructive assemblies where the arrangement of parts is the program. See David Merrill.
• inFORM (2013). A shape display: a bed of motorised pins that renders three-dimensional form physically and can push back against a hand.
• Radical Atoms (2012). Ishii's successor vision — a hypothetical material that can change shape and properties dynamically, so that the physical representation and the digital model are the same thing rather than two things kept in sync.

Key Ideas

• Physical representation is also physical control. In a TUI the object that displays the data is the object that changes it. There is no separate input device, and therefore no translation step. Compare the gulf of execution.
• Persistence and legibility. A physical arrangement holds its state visibly, without power, and is inspectable by everyone in the room.
• Multi-person by default. Several people can act simultaneously on separate objects, which screen interfaces have to simulate.
• Foreground and background. Ishii's framing pairs graspable objects in the centre of attention with ambient media at the periphery — the two halves of the same programme.

Criticism

TUIs are expensive to build, hard to reconfigure, and poorly suited to abstract or high-dimensional data. Physical objects cannot be duplicated, undone or scaled in the way software elements can, and the loss of those operations is substantial. Two decades of research has produced enduring influence on museum installations, education, music controllers and ambient devices, and very few general-purpose products. See MyVu and Mobile Text Entry on the same pattern.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Tangible media is the most sustained institutional argument that the screen is a historical accident rather than the natural form of computing, and its ambient work is the practical origin of much of what calm technology later formalised.

Related Reading

• Hiroshi Ishii
• Media Lab at MIT
• David Merrill
• Matt Gorbet
• Calm Technology
• Materials