Over the past few days I have been investigating the major developments in tangible interfaces used for developed for “phatic communication”. This has been quite successful, certainly from an academic standpoint, though I have found it difficult to ascertain whether there have been any major developments in the commercial sector, though I think its doubtful as this is still a very experimental field. This however could be an opportunity for some primary research to find this out…
In researching the major bits of work done in this area I started with the most recent example and what sparked my original interest in tangible media – Connectibles! I was interested in where the creator Jeevan James Kalanithi, got the inspiration for this project and worked backwards from there really.
The major developments that I have discovered so far are:
1997: InTouch – Scott Brave & Andrew Dahley (MIT – tangible bits)
2001: LumiTouch – Angela Chang, Brad Koerner, Benjamin Resner & XingChen Wang (MIT – tangible bits)
2003: GustBowl – Dennis, Pieter, Marataan (Delft University – Netherlands)
2003: SynchroMate – Martin Gibbs, Steve Howard, Frank Vetere, Marcus Bunyan (Uni Melbourne)
2006: LoversCups – Chia-Hsun Jackie Lee and Hyemin Chung (MIT)
2007: Connectibles – Jeevan James Kalanithi (MIT Tangible Bits)
Unsurprisingly the tangible bits department at the MIT media lab headed up by Hiroshi Ishii features strongly on this list.
Another discovery though this research focusing on inspiration for tangible interfaces already out there was that of the so called “father of Ubiquitous Computer” Mark Weiser and his seminal paper “The computer for the 21st century” where a world beyond the screen was first realised
