Idea Bits: A Tangible Design Tool to Aid Idea Generation for Tangible Manipulation

Tangible interaction design students often find it difficult to generate ideas for tangible manipulation. They often restrict their explorations to a few familiar possibilities. To our knowledge, there is no design tool that focuses on facilitating the exploration of a variety of manipulation and aiding generation of ideas for manipulation. To address this gap, we designed Idea Bits, a tangible design tool consisting of interactive physical artifacts that enable users to experience a set of manipulations. These artifacts are coupled with digital examples of tangible systems and technical implementation guidance to help users understand how to implement the manipulations. Our work contributes knowledge about the generation of ideas for manipulation and will be useful to tangible interaction design students, instructors, practitioners, and researchers.