dinks

Dinks: Digital Interactive Keys - Tangible Computing Platform and Support Creativity Tool

System Description

DInKs, Digital Interactive Keys, which re-conceptualizes the traditional QWERTY keyboard style interaction as input and output using tangible digital devices along with a larger display device. DInKs are a creativity support tool that is made familiar by providing keyboard-like input. However, the user experience is changed to include interactive content on the keys and composition as physical movement of the keys. Since the Keys of DInKs are programmable, the possible applications for creative composition are unlimited, for example, DInKs can be programmed for the creative composition of elements that include letters, words, images, shapes, and sounds.

My Role: I conducted a protocol analysis with FBS ontology.

System Design

Interface designed by Jin Goog Kim

DInKs is a design that integrates cubes and a tablet into a joint cube-tablet design. Cubes and tablet designs each have affordances, but they are not necessarily additive. We explored the integration of these affordances by first defining how they pertain to cubes and tablet, in terms of user actions and system actions:

Cubes affordances pertain to: user actions on cubes (e.g., Shake) and resulting cube system actions (e.g., cubes display changes).
Tablet affordances pertain to user actions on the tablet display (e.g., drag and drop) and resulting tablet system actions (e.g., a display object moves).

The DINKS platform offers two main contributions to interaction design for creative composition: (1) separate interaction spaces for both the composition and its elements and (2) flexible keys that can represent various elements of the composition.

Potential creative composition applications that demonstrate the generality of the DINKS platform:

Compositions of words, sounds, and shapes.

User Study

We use a case study approach as an early exploration of the differences between tangible interaction and pointing interaction in a collaborative task. In the experiment the participants are asked to combine words from a given set of 6 words, and then describe meanings for the combined words. In the instructions the participants are asked to think about the function, behavior, and structure of the combined word when creating its meaning. The visual display features of the words were maintained across the two conditions, but varied across conditions in terms of the affordances for interacting with the words: words were displayed on tangible user interface cubes (Cubes Condition, Left) or printed on a poster board (Right).

Analysis

Our analysis of the video stream for each session involves segmenting the video into discrete elements defined by a start time and end time, and assigning a code to each segment. We started by segmenting the verbal stream according to speaker, and then segmenting it into smaller segments so that a segment is formed around the utterance of a word combination or around the definition of a word combination. In order to associate the gestures and actions with design issues, we had an additional stage of segmentation in which each segment is associated with one “FBS” code using the FBS coding scheme described below. Segmentation and FBS coding were done simultaneously. We then coded each segment using a gesture/action coding scheme described below. We coded a gesture for each of the two children’s left and right hand for each FBS segment.

FBS Coding

Function: The intentions or purposes of the design artifact
Behavior: How the structure of an artifact achieves its functions
Structure: The components which make up an artifact and their relationships

Gesture Coding

G: Grasping
P: Pointing
OG: Other Gesture
NG: No Gesture
NV: Not Visible

The cubes condition served as an environment that has more gesture and action than the poster condition.

Tangible interaction encourages more epistemic actions.
Tangible interaction encourages more fluid body movement.
Tangible interaction encourages the use of both hands.