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WHEN: Tuesday 1-4 pm
WHERE: E15-341
THE FIRST CLASS: September 10th (Tue), 2024
THE LAST CLASS: December 10th (Tue), 2024
INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Hiroshi Ishii <ishii@mit.edu> Hiroshi Ishii's CV
GUEST LECTURERS
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Labrune jb@media.mit.edu
TBN
TAs:
Lucy Li <lucy_li@media.mit.edu>
Quincy Kuang <quincyku@media.mit.edu>
Lingdong Huang <lingdong@media.mit.edu>
Hye Jun Youn <hyoun95@media.mit.edu>
Keunwook Kim <keunwook@mit.edu>
Yunyi (Rainee) Wang <raineewa@mit.edu>
Admin: TBN
CONTACT: mas834_2024_staff@media.mit.edu (instructor, TAs, and staff)
▶︎ PRE-REGISTRATION / CROSS-Registration: If you are interested in taking this course, please pre-register for MAS.834 by September 2nd (Mon) so that your name will show up on the MIT CANVAS site. Your accessibility to the MIT CANVAS as a pre-registered student is the condition for the MAS.834 enrollment. If you need help pre-registering, please contact the Registrar’s Office at MIT or the Registrar’s Office at your institutes.
▶︎ SIGN-UP: If you are taking this course, please complete and submit this Google Form by noon on Monday, September 2nd.
If you have questions about the contents of the MAS.834 course, please send an email to mas834_2024_staff@media.mit.edu.
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This HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) course will explore the design space of Tangible User Interfaces (Tangible Bits and Radical Atoms) that give dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. Our goal is to broaden the bandwidth of interaction between people and digital information, making bits directly manipulable with our hands and perceptible at the periphery of human awareness. Through the invention of new digital/physical materials, we hope to enhance our capabilities to express, communicate, and design using the full range of human senses and skills. We will pursue tangible interactions that are aesthetically pleasing and inspiring in addition to being practical.
Among various applications to support human activities, we have been researching Tangible Telepresence to strengthen connectedness among people separated spatially and temporally (e.g., inTOUCH, inFORM). We introduce "tangibility" to interpersonal communication and collaboration channels to enhance the sense of co-presence (social presence).
We also explore the new vision of TeleAbsence, extending the notion of Telepresence to the past of life and the afterlife. We conduct a speculative design of illusory communication to recall the memories of loved ones, favorite places, and events you wish to remember and not forget. In this context, we focus on old tangible objects such as antique telephones, acoustic musical instruments, typewriters, historic scientific instruments, and AR techniques to explore interactive storytelling and access the memory associated with the tangible legacies.
MAS.834 will run the “Yesterday's Tomorrow Design Studio” which provides a novel framework for the intergenerational exploration of technological heritage and material culture guided by our TeleAbsence vision. In the studio, students will examine ancestral artifacts from the pre-digital era to re-imagine a more sustainable design future. The program aims to cultivate sensitivity to the experiential qualities of tangible interfaces while inspiring thoughtful dialogue across generations to rethink the relationship between cultural heritage and design.
MAS.834 is a project-based interaction design course centered around design workshops, the literature on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), dynamic shape displays, programmable materials, and telepresence. This course has two primary student group projects to design TUIs for “Yesterday's Tomorrow,” as well as various guest lecturers from relevant fields of HCI, arts, interaction design, and enabling technologies.
Students will design and develop experimental TUIs, novel applications, engaging interaction scenarios, and enabling technologies in the design studio environment, using sketches, animation, physical mockups, video, and working prototypes to solicit studio discussion. Course enrollment is limited to around 30~35 to keep a design studio atmosphere.
This course is 100% in-person (physical) meetings on the MIT Campus (E15-341) as a default. We will extensively use cloud-based digital tools such as Canvas, Miro, Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets, Dropbox, and other remote collaboration groupware. We use Zoom for class recording and guest speakers.
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Draft Schedule
Week 1: Course Orientation: HCI and Tangible UI
Week 2: Telepresence/TeleAbsence and Introducing “Yesterday’s Tomorrow Design Studio”
Week 3: (Speculative) Design Workshop
Week 4: HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) Tangible UI, Ambient UI, Spatial UI, Material UI.
Week 5: HHI (Human-Human Interaction): CSCW & TelePresence/TeleAbsence
Week 6: RoboTangible and Radical Atoms
Week 7: User Study Design
Week 8: Project 1 mid-term review
Week 9: Morphing Materials & Fabrications
Week 10: Learning for Children, Art and Heritage
Week 11: Human-AI Interaction, Vision-driven Research
Week 12: Project 2 final review & Group Photo Shooting
* No class on October 8 (ML member meeting), October 15 (student holiday) and November 11 (Veterans Day)
MAS.834 Trailer "Making Digital Tangible"ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award Lecture by Hiroshi at CHI 2019 in Glasgow on May 6th, 2019
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In 1997, we presented our vision of “Tangible Bits” at the CHI ’97 conference. We proposed the concept of Tangible User Interface (TUI) that is based on physical embodiment of digital information and computation, in order to go beyond the current dominant paradigm of “Painted Bits” or Graphical User Interface (GUI). Humans have evolved a heightened ability to sense and manipulate the physical world, yet the GUI based on intangible pixels takes little advantage of this capacity. The TUI builds upon our dexterity by embodying digital information in physical space. TUIs expand the affordances of physical objects, surfaces, and spaces so they can support direct engagement with the digital world.
Through the design of a variety of TUIs, however, we have learned that TUIs are limited by the rigidity of “atoms” in comparison with the fluidity of “bits.” TUIs have limited ability to change the form or properties of physical objects in real time. This constraint can make the physical state of TUIs inconsistent with the underlying digital models.
To address this challenge, we presented our new vision, “Radical Atoms,” in 2012. Radical Atoms takes a leap beyond Tangible Bits by assuming a hypothetical generation of materials that can change form and appearance dynamically, becoming as reconfigurable as pixels on a screen.
Radical Atoms is a computationally transformable and reconfigurable material that is bidirectionally coupled with an underlying digital model (bits) so that dynamic changes of physical form can be reflected in digital states in real time, and vice versa.
Radical Atoms is the future material that can transform their shape, conform to constraints, and inform the users of their affordances. Radical Atoms is a vision for the future of human-material interaction, in which all digital information has a physical manifestation so that we can interact directly with it. We no longer think of designing the interface, but rather of the interface itself as material. We may call it “Material User Interface (MUI).”
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