Reflections about Symbolic vs. Iconic Representations in TUIs

Authors

L. Schwartz and T. Latour

Reference

in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1861: Proceedings of the 3rd European Tangible Interaction Studio (ETIS 2017), Esch/Alzette, Luxembourg, June 19-23, 2017

Description

Currently designed Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) propose both iconic and symbolic tangible objects (TO). Since iconic TOs should enable to interact more naturally like in the real world and, hypothetically, require less learning time than symbolic TOs, some questions arise: Why do symbolic TOs exist? When to use iconic or symbolic representation in TOs? This paper discusses these questions and makes some assumptions on the abstraction of concepts, the function of TOs (container, token or tool) and the context influencing the design choices of TOs.

Link

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1861/paper3.pdf