Abstract
Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) enable physical affordances that encourage the spatial manipulation of multiple physical objects to interact with digital information. We claim that the affordances of tangible interaction can affect design cognition on spatial tasks. While many researchers have claimed that TUIs improve spatial cognition, there is a lack of agreement about what improve means and a lack of empirical evidence to support the general claim. While most cognitive studies of TUIs focus on a comparison of tangible and traditional GUI keyboard and mouse interaction, we focus on comparing the use of TUIs on spatial versus nonspatial design tasks to validate the claim that tangible interaction specifically affects spatial design tasks. The results show that TUIs encourage users to perform more epistemic actions, leads to unexpected discoveries, and off-loads spatial reasoning to the physical objects. We conclude that the positive impact of tangible interaction is more dominant in spatial design tasks than nonspatial design tasks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Kessell A, Tversky B (2006) Using diagrams and gestures to think and talk about insight problems. In: Proceedings of the meeting of the cognitive science society, vol 28, p 28
Goldin-Meadow S, Beilock SL (2010) Action’s influence on thought: the case of gesture. Perspect Psychol Sci 5(6):664–674
Graham TA (1999) The role of gesture in children’s learning to count. J Exp Child Psychol 74(4):333–355
Fjeld M, Barendregt W (2009) Epistemic action: a measure for cognitive support in tangible user interfaces? Behav Res Methods 41(3):876–881
Fleming M, Maglio PP (2015) How physical interaction helps performance in a scrabble-like task. In: CogSci, pp 716–721
Antle AN, Droumeva M, Ha D (2009, June) Hands on what? comparing children’s mouse-based and tangible-based interaction. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on interaction design and children, ACM, pp 80–88
Maehigashi A, Miwa K, Oda K, Nakamura Y, Mori K, Igami T (2016) Influence of 3D images and 3D-printed objects on spatial reasoning. In: Proceedings of the 38th annual meeting of the cognitive science society, pp 414–419
Johannes K, Powers J, Couper L, Silberglitt M, Davenport J (2016) Tangible models and haptic representations aid learning of molecular biology concepts. Grantee Submission, 372–377
Smithwick D, Kirsh D (2015) Let’s Get physical: thinking with things in architectural design. In: CogSci, pp 2236–2241
Kim MJ, Maher ML (2008) The impact of tangible user interfaces on designers’ spatial cognition. HCI 23(2):101–137
Maher ML, Lee L, Gero JS, Yu R, Clausner T (2017) Characterizing tangible interaction during a creative combination task. Design computing and cognition’16. Springer, Cham, pp 39–58
Clausner T, Maher ML, Gonzales B (2015) Conceptual Combination modulated by action using tangible computers. In: Poster presented at the 37th annual meeting of the cognitive science society, Pasadena
Soleimani A, Green KE, Herro D, Walker ID (2016, June) A tangible, story-construction process employing spatial, computational-thinking. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on interaction design and children, ACM, pp 157–166
Kirsh D, Maglio P (1994) On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cogn Sci 18(4):513–549
Dorst K, Cross N (2001) Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution. Des Stud 22(5):425–437
Cook SW, Mitchell Z, Goldin-Meadow S (2008) Gesturing makes learning last. Cognition 106(2):1047–1058
Trofatter C, Kontra C, Beilock S, Goldin-Meadow S (2015) Gesturing has a larger impact on problem-solving than action, even when action is accompanied by words. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30(3):251–260
Alibali MW, Kita S, Young A (2000) Gesture and the process of speech production: we think, therefore we gesture. Lang Cogn Process 15:593–613
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kim, J., Maher, M.L., Lee, L. (2019). The Effect of Tangible Interaction on Spatial Design Tasks. In: Gero, J. (eds) Design Computing and Cognition '18. DCC 2018. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05363-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05363-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05362-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05363-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)