Measuring the effect of tangible interaction on design cognition

Abstract

Recent developments in interaction design provide gesture and tangible interaction as an alternative or complement to mouse, keyboard, and touch interaction. Tangible user interfaces provide affordances that encourage and facilitate specific actions on physical objects. There is evidence that gesture and action affect cognition, and therefore it is hypothesized that the affordances of tangible interaction will affect design cognition. In this paper we report on the analysis of experimental data in which participants are asked to make word combinations from a set of six nouns and give them meaning. The task is presented as a design task with references to function, behavior, and structure of the word combination meanings. The participants performed the task in two conditions: one in which grasping the words was afforded and one in which pointing at the words was afforded. We segmented and coded the verbal data using the function-behavior-structure coding scheme to compare the participants’ references to design issues across the two conditions. The results show that the two conditions differ in the phase in which they search for word combinations and the phase in which they described new meanings.