High Tech, High Touch

As a child in preschool, I remember one of my first encounters with forming words was playing with a set of building blocks, with colorful letters etched into the faces of the wooden cubes. More creative students were given the sets with different shapes, building fantastic fortresses that knights in shining armor would defend or castles with turrets, where princesses would let down their hair and be rescued by princes on white horses.

These large “blocks for tots” produce endless hours of childhood innocence and mesmerism, promoting the creative development of the brain’s right hemisphere. Children further develop their sense of feel and touch by stacking the blocks into an endless array of shapes, patterns, and forms. Through our early days, we are taught to sift, sort, and stack items, using our hands and eyes to organize images, thoughts, and ideas.

Now, in the new millennium, we have entered into a space linking technology with toys in ways never deemed possible during my childhood. Of course today we are bombarded with electronic games for children, singing plush animals, and even video consoles aimed for adults, but I am interested in a new application spanning a whole new market, from newborns to musicians, which roots humans to their primal instincts of touch and interaction using their fingers and hands.

Siftables is a tangible interaction platform that looks like a handful of electronic building tiles with miniature computer screens. By joining, tilting, or grouping tiles together, the user can form connections and explore interactions between the ideas presented on each tile.

The founders, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi from MIT, aim to create new display devices that allow users to handle and display data in a natural, instinctive manner. Siftables paves way for a new mode of human-computer interaction, namely a tangible user interface (TUI), in contrast to the traditional graphical user interface (GUI), which some users may find constraining in today’s technological landscape. Since these 2-by-2 inch computer screens communicate with each other, they adapt and change based on their surrounding tiles and the relationships between them. Some of the applications shown on demonstrations include music composition, mathematical functions, and color mixology. These tiles have the ability not only to communicate wirelessly with each other, but also with a PC.

Imagine the ability for users to explore new relationships between ideas, thoughts, and images, and how educators can introduce new forms of learning into the traditional school system. Siftables allows humans to think beyond classifying and itemizing objects at an individual level and to explore how objects react with one another, similar to forces in nature. It appears that regardless of how basic building blocks evolve, our primary instincts urge us to explore these differences in order to quell our inquisitive nature and develop new meaning for ourselves and for our environment.

6 degrees...and dropping

Researchers study the structure of social networks to understand relationships people form with one another. These networks are often based on a clustering concept, where connections are formed between individuals with a common theme, such as a shared interest or mutual friend. With the increased popularity of simplified personal homepages on social media sites such as Facebook, researchers can easily gathering information about social community formation, relationships between users, and the major influencers or mavericks within each group.

Mind mapping is a visual method of collecting images, words, thoughts, and subjects, and clustering them around a central word or idea. Users create diagrams in order to depict interactions and connections within large amounts of data. Similar to brainstorming, this method of data collection is non-linear, and encourages a radial approach to collecting thoughts associated to the main topic. This often results in users discovering new interconnections between two entities that were previously considered radically disconnected.

TouchGraph considers the notion of combining these two ideas together and creating a visual representation of social networks, allowing users to further explore connections between people, thoughts, and interests. On Amazon.com, TouchGraph introduces consumers to new products based on past purchases or browsed products. Instead of being “sold” recommended products by Amazon.com, consumers have the ability to discover how one product is related to another. This visualization may increase the recommended products’ relevance; thereby increasing a consumer’s interest in the product and lead to increased purchasing behavior, while expanding a consumer’s initial purchasing set.

This sounds great for marketers, doesn’t it? How about using this technology to allow users to further explore social networks? TouchGraph also allows users on Facebook to see how they are connected to people in different geographic locations and to explore relationships further by giving them a preview of those people’s friends. This means, people using TouchGraph who do not know you may have actually come across your profile, no matter how high you’ve placed your privacy settings. The issue is that you don’t even need to be using TouchGraph for users to see your profile.

When does data collection and visualization become too intrusive and how can it be monitored on the web? If this is the direction we are moving towards on the web, should we consider limiting the amount of personal information we post online? While TouchGraph is an amazing platform to understand more about consumer behavior and improve relationship marketing between buyers and sellers, it is also inhibiting our freedom and choice for privacy?