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Statement
Hiroshi Ishii:
Abacus – The Origin of Tangible Bits
The author met a highly successful computational device called the „abacus“ when he was two years old. He could enjoy the touch and feel of the “digits” physically represented as arrays of beads. This simple abacus was not merely a digital computational device: because of its physical affordances, the abacus also became a musical instrument, an imaginary toy train, even a back-scratcher. He was captivated by the artifact’s sound and its tactile properties. This childhood abacus was also a medium for awareness. When his mother kept household accounts, he was aware of her activities by the sound of the abacus, knowing that he could not ask her to play while the abacus made its music. This abacus revealed a new direction in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that we call Tangible User Interfaces (TUI).
First, the abacus makes no distinction between “input” and “output.” Instead, its beads, rods, and frame all serve as physical representations of numerical information and computational mechanism. They serve as directly manipulable physical controls to compute on numbers.
Second, the simple and transparent mechanical structure of the abacus (without any digital black boxes made of silicon) provides rich physical affordances. Anyone can immediately understand what to do with this artifact without reading a manual. The TUI design challenge is to seamlessly extend physical affordances into the digital domain.
The Tangible User Interface (TUI) is significantly different from the GUI. The TUI gives physical form to digital information, serving as both a representation and a control.
The TUI’s physical embodiment makes digital information directly manipulable with our hands and naturally perceptible through our peripheral senses.