David Merrill

Biography

David Merrill is an American technologist and entrepreneur working on tangible interfaces. He took his doctorate at the MIT Media Lab in the Fluid Interfaces group under Pattie Maes, with earlier degrees from Stanford, and co-founded Sifteo with Jeevan Kalanithi in 2009 to commercialise the research.

Siftables

Merrill's doctoral work produced Siftables: small, independent, screen-bearing blocks, each about an inch and a half square, with a colour display, motion sensing, and short-range awareness of the other blocks around them. Rather than a single interface surface, the system is a set of physical objects that know where they are relative to each other and what is being done to them — tilted, shaken, stacked, placed side by side, brushed against a neighbour.

The argument behind the design is that computing interfaces address a very narrow band of human physical capability. People are skilled at manipulating many objects at once, at sorting and grouping by hand, at judging by weight and position; conventional interfaces make almost no use of this and route everything through one pointer or one finger on glass. Siftables gave each digital element a body, so that the ordinary competences of handling small objects became the interaction language.

Merrill's 2009 TED demonstration made the work widely known, showing the blocks used for word games, sound sequencing, arithmetic, colour mixing and sorting. The commercial product, Sifteo Cubes, shipped in 2011, with a second generation in 2012. Sifteo was acquired by 3D Robotics in 2014.

Key Ideas

• Manipulables as interface. The design category Merrill argues for: not one screen you touch but many small objects you handle, where physical arrangement is the input rather than a metaphor for it.
• Distributed state. Each block holds part of the system's state, so the arrangement on the table is the program's current condition — visible, inspectable and modifiable by anyone in the room without a mode change.
• Multi-person by default. Because the pieces are separate objects, several people can act on the system simultaneously. Most screen interfaces are single-user by construction, and collaboration has to be simulated.
• Physical intelligence. Merrill's framing of the underlying claim, related to the tangible-media tradition of Hiroshi Ishii and to the argument Mark Hansen makes theoretically in Bodies in Code: that the body already knows a great deal, and interfaces that recruit that knowledge cost less effort than interfaces that require new abstractions.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Siftables is a well-documented experiment in the alternative to the glass rectangle. It is worth studying both for what it demonstrated — that granular, multi-handed, multi-person interaction is achievable and immediately legible to users, including small children — and for what happened to it commercially, which is the more common fate of interface research that does not fit an existing distribution channel. Compare MyVu and the Twiddler: the same pattern of a sound idea losing to the incumbent form factor.

Related Reading

• Matt Gorbet
• Materials
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
• Human-Computer Interaction
• MIT Media Lab

External Links

• TED: David Merrill