The card box at hand: exploring the potentials of a paper-based tangible interface for education and research in art history

This paper presents art historical research and education as a novel application area for tangible user interfaces. The academic discipline of art history and its subjects are currently undergoing changes that will lead to a rising importance of computers. However, the computer is generally not the art historian's tool of choice. We feel that this is due to existing GUI systems not fully meeting researchers' needs. We therefore propose a design for a tabletop tangible user interface considering art historians' desire "to collect things as tokens" [1] and to remain within traditional techniques. We present a case study of the usage of image cards within iconographic work. Based on our results, we derive implications for the design of the tangible interface that integrates approved traditional paper based techniques with the advantages of digital representation.

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