Cookie-Scale Computers and Other Physical Approaches to Computing
The graphical user interface has become the de facto metaphor for most of our activities using computers, but given our modern diversity of information tasks, today’s desktop environment seems a bit too “one-size-fits-all”. Tangible and ubiquitous computing research, along with recent consumer products such as the Wii and iPhone show compelling interactive systems emerging through the co-design of physical form and input/output affordances. At the MIT Media Lab and San Francisco-based Taco Lab we have created a number of working systems that explore this theme, most recently siftables: a collection of self-contained, gesture-sensitive electronic tokens that can be handled like alphabet blocks and display information graphically.