A Design Framework for Designing Tangible Interaction for Collaborative Use Eva Hornecker Institute of Design & Assessment of Technology Vienna University of Technology Austria Eva.hornecker@media.tuwien.ac.at ABSTRACT This paper describes a framework (under progress) for designing tangible interaction for collaborative use. Four design aspects/themes should be carefully exploited, if one wants to design a tangible interaction system intended for collaborative use: space and spaciality, tangible manipulation, embodied facilitation and representations and their expressiveness. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation] General Terms Design, Human Factors,. Keywords Tangible User Interfaces, Tangible Interaction, Design, . 1. INTRODUCTION Tangible User Interfaces (short: TUIs) have become a hot topic in HCI. Until quite recently research was mostly technology-driven, focusing on the development of new systems. A change in focus can be detected from the special issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing on “tangible interfaces in perspective”. Yet there still is a lack of theory, why “tangible interaction” works and what exactly is important to it [5]. And although cooperation support might be the most important generic feature offered by TUIs, this issue has attracted even less attention. Often people seem to assume that cooperation-specific advantages of physical environments are simply inherited by tangible interfaces. But a union of advantages from physical and digital worlds does not come automatically. We should know which properties of physical environments to maintain or explicitly exploit. Otherwise we risk destroying the resources relied upon in collaboration and diminishing positive effects of co-presence of human actors. In my PhD thesis [10] I assembled findings from CSCW, work studies, communication research and design disciplines regarding social effects of physical, manipulable 3D media, identifying several lines of reasoning arguing for positive effects of TUIs on collaboration. Part of this project have also been empirical studies of cooperative situations supported by tangible media and a redesign study of a TUI. Ongoing work consists of distilling a design framework from the thesis results while broadening its scope to tangible interaction. This framework is introduced in the remainder of this paper. Tangible interaction encompasses a much broader scope of systems or interfaces, which are not restricted to controlling digital data via manipulation of tangible objects (one can control real devices as well) and to the placement and relocation of tokens, what has been criticized as an imitation of interaction methods from the screen and neglecting the richness of embodied action [2, 4]. Therefore it seemed productive to address this larger design space, which also yields a higher number of systems to consider, leaving the somewhat artificial confines of any definition of TUIs behind. 1.1 Designing for collaboration Some argumentation may be necessary about why to consider collaborative use. Many researchers agree that TUIs are especially suited to support collocated collaboration and report productive, enjoyable group processes. The number of TUI-systems aimed at collaborative scenarios – often design or group learning situations – documents this belief. Research is also acknowledging that social interaction is an inherent and important part of everyday life and of getting work done. E.g. museum visitors often come in groups and group interaction (also with strangers) plays an important role in the visit experience [3,8]. In work situations implicit communication and coordination, both co-present and distributed in time and space, can be found even in at first sight seemingly individual work. Designing FOR cooperation is analogue with the understanding within interaction design that one cannot design an experience, only for it – one can create opportunities for experience. Similarly we cannot force people to cooperate, but we can induce it and create a „force field“ encouraging collaboration. The framework presented here aims to help in creating such “force fields” by offering “design sensitities” [3] and some (soft) guidelines. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’04, Month 1–2, 2004, City, State, Country. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.