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.