Architales: physical/digital co-design of an interactive story table

Many research efforts today explore how digitally augmented tables enable face-to-face interaction with digital content and applications. Yet the design of digital tables is still largely driven by the constraints and requirements of the underlying sensing technologies. In order to move digital tables into our real-world physical spaces, researchers need to work closely with architects and industrial designers in order to engage the knowledge and skills from a long history of physical design and fabrication in the creation of tabletop systems. This paper presents Architales, an interactive story table for gallery exhibition, developed as an experiment in physical/digital co-design. We describe the creation of the interactive table, tangible storytelling system, and story content, which evolved together in a closely unified design process, drawing on the skills from computing, media, design and architecture. We also describe lessons learned about the interdisciplinary design process an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: TEI
• Authors: Ali Mazalek, Claudia Winegarden, Tristan Al-Haddad, Susan J. Robinson, Chih-Sung Wu
• Keywords: Digital Tables, Hardware, Physical/digital Co-design, Tables Enable Face-to-face, TEI 2009