Valérie Maquil

The ColorTable : a design story

The paper describes the design story of the ColorTable, a tangible user interface in support of urban planners and diverse stakeholders collaboratively envisioning urban change, which was developed in an iterative process of design-evaluation-feedback-redesign in a series of workshops with users in the context of real urban planning projects. It seeks to clarify a number of more general design issues related to tangible user interfaces -- how to make use of material and spatial properties in designing both, physical interface and multiple and simultaneous interactions; how to handle the complexity of urban projects while keeping interfaces and interactions simple and transparent.

Expressive interactions - supporting collaboration in urban design

This paper discusses technological interventions in support of planners, citizens and other stakeholders in envisioning and nego-tiating an urban project. A set of prototypal tools, including a tangible user interface, has been developed that allow users to create and manipulate visual/auditory scenes and mesh these scenes with the real environment of an urban site. The paper discusses how toallsupport users - different types of stakeholders - in the collaborative creation of mixed reality configurations as an integral part of expressing their ideas about an urban project, distinguishing between different types and levels of cooperation. It also looks into how to use mixed reality tools for enhancing an already highly developed representational culture.

A geospatial tangible user interface to support stakeholder participation in urban planning

The complexity of urban projects today requires new approaches to integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collaborative design. This paper introduces the concept of Geospatial Tangible User Interfaces (GTUI), and reports on the design and implementation of such a GTUI to support stakeholder participation in collaborative urban planning. The proposed system uses physical objects to interact with large digital maps and geospatial data projected onto a tabletop. It is implemented using a PostGIS database, a web map server, the computer vision framework reacTIVision, a Java based TUIO client, and GeoTools. Based on a series of comments collected during an evaluation workshop with stakeholders in the fields of urban and energy planning, we discuss how maps projected on a table and physical objects can be an new approach to participatory bottom-up urban planning.

COPSE: Rapidly Instantiating Problem Solving Activities based on Tangible Tabletop Interfaces

Collaborative problem solving is a skill that has become very important in our everyday lives and is constantly gaining attention in educational settings. In this paper, we present COPSE: a novel and unique software framework for instantiating Microworlds as collaborative problem solving activities on tangible tabletop interfaces. The framework provides three types of building blocks: widgets (provide input and localized feedback), equations (define the model), and scenes (visualize feedback), which can be specified in the form of structured text. Aim of COPSE is to simplify processes of creating, adjusting, and reusing custom Microworlds scenarios. We describe the structure of the framework, provide an example of a scenario, and report on a case study where we have used COPSE together with 33 teachers to build new scenarios on the fly.

Towards a framework for geospatial tangible user interfaces in collaborative urban planning

The increasing complexity of urban planning projects today requires new approaches to better integrate stakeholders with different professional backgrounds throughout a city. Traditional tools used in urban planning are designed for experts and offer little opportunity for participation and collaborative design. This paper introduces the concept of geospatial tangible user interfaces (GTUI) and reports on the design and implementation as well as the usability of such a GTUI to support stakeholder participation in collaborative urban planning. The proposed system uses physical objects to interact with large digital maps and geospatial data projected onto a tabletop. It is implemented using a PostGIS database, a web map server providing OGC web services, the computer vision framework reacTIVision, a Java-based TUIO client, and GeoTools. We describe how a GTUI has be instantiated and evaluated within the scope of two case studies related to real world collaborative urban planning scenarios. Our results confirm the feasibility of our proposed GTUI solutions to (a) instantiate different urban planning scenarios, (b) support collaboration, and (c) ensure an acceptable usability.

Kniwwelino: A Lightweight and WiFi Enabled Prototyping Platform for Children

Nowadays, computational thinking skills are considered as fundamental for our future daily life and many initiatives and tools are created to foster these skills. In this paper, we present the Kniwwelino, a new platform for prototyping physical computing projects based on WiFi. The novelty of our solution lies in the use of a WiFi chip on a small, extendable board, programmable via a block based visual programming language, making the platform compact, low-cost, WiFi enabled, and accessible to children. This paper presents the design rationale and implementation of the platform as well as two simple, example projects making use of the new WiFi-based functionalities.

In the Footsteps of Henri Tudor: Creating Batteries on a Tangible Interactive Workbench

This paper describes the design and implementation of BatSim, a tangible user interface for playful discovery of different methods of creating batteries. BatSim combines tangible interactions with augmented reality in an interactive workbench to support museum visitors in physically performing the different steps of the procedures and viewing the consequences on embedded screens. In this paper we describe the rationale of our design solution as well as how it could be realized in three iterations, progressively focusing on 1) the spatial setting, 2) the model and interactions and 3) the form and feedback. Based on our gained insights, we discuss the importance of combining multiple prototyping methods to take into account the different facets of tangible interaction design.

Teachers’ feedback on the end-user development of tangible systems

This paper presents an approach for involving teachers as end-users in the development of tangible systems for the classroom. The approach makes use of a series of building blocks, a web tool to visually specify and generate XML files, as well as a piece of software automatically generating running applications from these specification files on a tangible tabletop. In October 2016, we have organised a workshop where 37 teachers created new tangible learning activities with the provided tools. In this paper we present the results from a questionnaire we distributed to these teachers, focussing on the usability of the web platform and the utility of the tools for their classroom.

Designing a Collaborative Problem Solving Task in the Context of Urban Planning

The construct to assess collaborative complex problem solving has two dimensions: the collaboration and the complex problem solving construct. Both have been defined in the past in the literature, but unfortunately no common model exists. In addition, current assessments lack of authentic tasks which enforce both face-two-face collaboration while solving a complex task. The paper presents a scenario where a task was designed to offer best conditions for assessing collaborative complex problem solving. The principal idea is that the actors play a certain role with specific objectives and different constraints. In addition, different implementations of feedback cues are provided.

Tangible-Based Assessment of Collaborative Problem Solving

Using Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) for assessing collaborative problems has only been marginally investigated in technology-based assessment. Our first empirical studies focused on light-weight performance measurements, usability, user experience, and gesture analysis to increase our understanding of how people interact with TUI in an assessment context. In this paper we present three of those studies: a windmill scenario where users can learn about the dynamics of energy generation using wind power; a traffic simulator educating the audience on the impacts of different traffic parameters on its fluidity; and a simple climate change scenario allowing children to comprehend the relation between their family’s behaviour and its effect on CO2 levels. The paper concludes each scenario by presenting assessment methodologies and observed learning outcome.