Call for participation

Invitation to participate to Internet of Tangibles studio

Please submit a statement of interest to internetoftangibles@gmail.com by January 31st, 2018

The studio Internet of Tangibles will be a unique opportunity to explore tangible interaction design applied to the Internet of Things, with a particular focus on the interaction-attention continuum. According to this theory, we will explore how different levels of attention can be exploited to interact with tangible IoT objects and how we can switch from one level of attention to another. Designers of IoT objects can explore focused interaction, to support reflection and memories, peripheral interaction, to raise awareness and control simple functions while performing other tasks, and implicit interaction, to make interaction with IoT disappear into our daily routines.

We aim at gathering people with different backgrounds (e.g., social sciences, computer science, psychology, design, future studies, etc.), creating groups of 3-4 people with heterogeneous skills, in order to encourage ideas and knowledge sharing from different perspectives. No particular skills are required for the studio: we will take care that each group will have at least one participant with technical skills.

During the studio, participants will engage in hands-on activities for designing tangible IoT objects. In the first part of the studio, participants will generate an idea of tangible IoT object and they will build a paper prototyping to illustrate the designed interactions. In the second part of the studio, participants will engage in hardware prototyping activity, tinkering with and hacking Arduino examples provided by the organizers.

We invite all people interested in joining this studio to send a statement of interest to internetoftangibles@gmail.com. The statement of interest should specify your background, in particular your affiliation, position and previous experience with hardware prototyping (e.g., Arduino) and low-fi interaction design activities, and your personal reason for attending the studio. Please submit a statement of interest by January 31st, 2018.

The studio will also allocate time for plenary discussions, allowing participants to know each other better and to get mutual knowledge of ongoing research, for networking purposes. To this purpose, we invite participants to submit a 2-4 page SIGCHI Extended Abstract position paper presenting their ongoing work or their vision of future work in this field. Position papers will be uploaded in the studio web site and presented in a 1-minute madness session during the studio. Please note that submitting a position paper is an optional contribution, you can attend the studio without sending a position paper.

As a follow up to the studio, we are planning to organize a special issue in a journal to gather scientific contributions to the research field of tangible interaction applied to the internet of things.