Tangible Representational Properties: Implications for Meaning Making

Taciana Pontual Falcão

doi:10.3390/mti2030054

Abstract

Tangible technologies are considered promising tools for learning, by enabling multimodal interaction through physical action and manipulation of physical and digital elements, thus facilitating representational concrete–abstract links. A key concept in a tangible system is that its physical components are objects of interest, with associated meanings relevant to the context. Tangible technologies are said to provide ‘natural’ mappings that employ spatial analogies and adhere to cultural standards, capitalising on people’s familiarity with the physical world. Students with intellectual disabilities particularly benefit from interaction with tangibles, given their difficulties with perception and abstraction. However, symbolic information does not always have an obvious physical equivalent, and meanings do not reside in the representations used in the artefacts themselves, but in the ways they are manipulated and interpreted. In educational contexts, meaning attached to artefacts by designers is not necessarily transparent to students, nor interpreted by them as the designer predicted. Using artefacts and understanding their significance is of utmost importance for the construction of knowledge within the learning process; hence the need to study the use of the artefacts in contexts of practice and how they are transformed by the students. This article discusses how children with intellectual disabilities conceptually interpreted the elements of four tangible artefacts, and which characteristics of these tangibles were key for productive, multimodal interaction, thus potentially guiding designers and educators. Analysis shows the importance of designing physical-digital semantic mappings that capitalise on conceptual metaphors related to children’s familiar contexts, rather than using more abstract representations. Such metaphorical connections, preferably building on physical properties, contribute to children’s comprehension and facilitate their exploration of the systems.

Highlights

Tangible and embodied interaction corresponds with a paradigm of human–computer interaction that brings computation and information more fully into the physical world, reconsidering the nature and uses of computation, capitalising on people’s physical skills and familiarity with objects from the physical world, and providing an interaction paradigm closer to what is considered ‘natural’ [1,2].Such paradigm is rooted in the theoretical frameworks of situated cognition, phenomenology, and embodied cognition, moving away from the positivist cognitive perspective that poses a strong separation between the mind and the external world
The definition of tangible interfaces is still open to interpretation, the research community has come to a general consensus according to which an artefact is considered a tangible system when it embeds digital data in material forms, yielding interactive systems that are computationally mediated, but generally not identifiable as ‘computers’ in the traditional sense [2,5], and where the distinction between ‘input’ and ‘output’ is less obvious and sometimes nonexistent [2,3,4]
This section, is described in their terms of their technical object. In this each iseach described in terms of technical functioning functioning and representational elements, followed byofanhow analysis of how childrenthe interpreted the and representational elements, followed by an analysis children interpreted metaphorical metaphorical representations embedded in each the design of each of them

Summary

Introduction

Tangible and embodied interaction corresponds with a paradigm of human–computer interaction that brings computation and information more fully into the physical world, reconsidering the nature and uses of computation, capitalising on people’s physical skills and familiarity with objects from the physical world, and providing an interaction paradigm closer to what is considered ‘natural’ [1,2]. Such paradigm is rooted in the theoretical frameworks of situated cognition, phenomenology, and embodied cognition, moving away from the positivist cognitive perspective that poses a strong separation between the mind and the external world. Users act within and touch the interface itself, bodily interacting (within the physical space) with physical objects that are coupled with computational resources, and that can provide immediate and dynamic haptic, visual, or auditory feedback to inform users of the computational interpretation of their actions [3]

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