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Learning and Thinking with Things
STEPHEN P. ANDERSON
Tangible Interfaces
The study of how humans learn is nothing new and not without many
solid advances. And yet, in the rush to adopt personal computers, tab-
lets, and similar devices, we’ve traded the benefits of hands-on learn-
ing and instruction for the scale, distribution, and easy data collection
that’s part and parcel to software programs. The computational bene-
fits of computers have come at a price; we’ve had to learn how to interact
with these machines in ways that would likely seem odd to our ances-
tors: mice, keyboards, awkward gestures, and many other devices and
rituals that would be nothing if not foreign to our predecessors. But
what does the future hold for learning and technology? Is there a way
to reconcile the separation between all that is digital with the diverse
range of interactions for which our bodies are capable? And how does
the role of interaction designer change when we’re working with smart,
potentially shape-shifting, objects? If we look at trends in technology,
especially related to tangible computing (where physical objects are
interfaced with computers), they point to a sci-fi future in which inter-
actions with digital information come out from behind glass to become
things we can literally grasp.
One such sign of this future comes from Vitamins, a multidisciplinary
design and invention studio based in London. As Figure 5 - 1 shows, it
has developed a rather novel system for scheduling time by using...
what else... Lego bricks!