The Effect of Tangible Interaction on Spatial Design Tasks

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) enable physical affordances that encourage the spatial manipulation of multiple physical objects to interact with digital information. We claim that the affordances of tangible interaction can affect design cognition on spatial tasks. While many researchers have claimed that TUIs improve spatial cognition, there is a lack of agreement about what improve means and a lack of empirical evidence to support the general claim. While most cognitive studies of TUIs focus on a comparison of tangible and traditional GUI keyboard and mouse interaction, we focus on comparing the use of TUIs on spatial versus nonspatial design tasks to validate the claim that tangible interaction specifically affects spatial design tasks. The results show that TUIs encourage users to perform more epistemic actions, leads to unexpected discoveries, and off-loads spatial reasoning to the physical objects. We conclude that the positive impact of tangible interaction is more dominant in spatial design tasks than nonspatial design tasks.