We present Tiles Cards, a tool to foster end-user design thinking of smart object applications. Tiles Cards facilitate participatory design by abstracting the complexity of IoT technology into a set of interaction primitives and composition rules accessible to nonexperts. Further, it promotes creative thinking by means of a mission-based game in which teams have to fulfill design tasks under constraints. Tiles Cards is a generic tool that can specialized to multiple application domains including learning and games. In this workshop we are presenting results from our pilot study discussing the opportunities of using card games for end-user design.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). AVI, June 07–10, 2016, Bari, Italy
Design tools; design cards; card game; tangible user interfaces.
H.5.2 Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): User interfaces – Theory and methods
Smart objects are everyday objects augmented with
technology to provide digital interactivity on top of a
traditional physical appearance. Examples are: a
paintbrush that samples colors from surfaces and use
them as drawing palette in a computer program [
Designing interaction styles for smart objects is more
complex than for traditional graphical user interfaces.
Besides the user interface can leverage mainstream
approaches such as keyboards and touchscreens; it can
also leverage physical manipulation performed by the
user on the object self like touching, shaking, tilting or
squeezing, the presence of nearby people and objects
or its location. Those inputs are often coupled with
simple feedbacks like light patterns, haptic or sound.
It does not just require to design software functions but
also the hardware and object’s physical semblance and
affordances, requiring skills from the fields of software
and hardware engineering and industrial design. This
task is challenged by the lack of guidelines and tools to
understand how the object’s physical affordances and
design are related [
Card-based design tools have been extensively used in
participatory design [
Cards can be used to play design games [
In fact, studies show that game rules add constraints
that can improve design outcomes [2] and foster
creativity. For example turn-taking helps ensuring that
everyone is involved in the process [
Tiles cards is a set of seven decks of cards divided in two groups: primitive cards and game cards. The former explains concepts proper of tangible interaction and IoT in an informative way, hiding end-users from unnecessary complexities. The latter brings dynamics, rules and goals to be used to gamify the brainstorming process. Primitive cards can be used alone as an informative tool, to make end-users familiar with concepts from the HCI and IoT research fields like gestural input or haptic feedbacks; or together with game cards to spur design actions. Tiles cards can be used by users alone or as part of design workshops facilitated by designers.
Each Tiles Card has two side: the front side explains the meaning of the card, and provide informative text and figure; the back of the card describes the category (deck) the card belongs to (Figure 1).
Cards are color-coded to facilitate sorting; they have
imprinted a unique ID to simplify data collection by
researchers during design workshops. In each deck
single cards are replicated to allow playing multiple
rounds without need re-shuffling. This is meant to leave
combinations of cards used in a game session available
for further reference. For each category we also provide
blank cards that can be personalized by end-users with
custom primitives and game rules. In this way we
expect to free participants’ creative impulses and allow
for thinking-out-of-the-box; popular user-designed
cards can be included in future version of the tool.
The design of Tiles cards comes from the awareness
that how IoT manifests itself is very broad. The
different technologies and use cases yield to a complex
design space that can be difficult to navigate without a
lot of research and knowledge about the IoT. This
complexity makes it difficult for end-users to engage
and contribute with their ideas in a meaningful way.
The game was designed to bridge this discrepancy. It
leverages the authors previous experience [
EXAMPLE A wallet with a light that turns green when your account balance is low.
Missions
M - 3 User friendly WHAT Ideas that solve a real need for users, and which are easy to use for a large number of people.
HOW TO JUDGE Would life be easier for the users with the ideas than without them? Could both your kids and grandparents use it?
Criteria
C - 8
In the remaining of this section we briefly describe the different cards desks we created. Tiles cards can be downloaded under the Creative Common license1.
Primitive cards have both informative and inspiring
roles. They are divided in four categories: objects,
input, output and compound actions. Objects cards
suggest a set of everyday, low-tech things that can be
made “smarter” by technology; e.g. a bike, a pair of
shoes or glasses, a wallet. Input and output cards
include interaction primitives that can be used to
describe the properties of an interface for smart objects
in terms of gestural inputs e.g. touch, shake, rotate,
location change; and output provided by the system
such as vibration, color change, sounds or phone
notifications. Those primitives have been chosen
because they can be quickly implemented in prototypes
using technology toolkits such as Arduino [
Game cards add game mechanics to the manipulation of primitive cards in order to foster end-user participation and facilitate collaborative creative thinking. It has been proved that adding restriction to idea generation activity can improve its outcome [6]. We designed games cards to be generic enough to be used for playing multiple games, for example to maximize the number or the quality of idea generated, using either collaborative or competitive dynamics. Game cards are divided in three categories: missions, bonus and criteria.
Missions (Figure 2-top) consist in a list of goals players in teams pursue collaboratively by combining primitive cards. Example of missions are “Off-screen: create a smart object that solves a task you would normally have had to use a screen to accomplish” and “Habit changing: create a smart object that helps a user to form or change a long-term habit”.
Criteria (Figure 2-bottom) constrain users’ design actions by providing guidelines to rate the outcomes of missions. Teams can be therefore incited to compete towards accomplishing a mission by maximizing certain criteria. Example of criteria are: “Enjoyment: How fun or enjoyable is the smart object for its users”, “Creativity: How the smart object solves the problem in a clever and unusual way” and “Feasibility: How the smart object solves the problem in a plausible matter, and that seems realistic to develop”. Criteria can be used to evaluate the outcome of a mission.
Finally, bonuses are cards that modify the gameplay by altering the game rules for a given round. This is expected to add elements of chance to disrupt and make the gameplay easier or more difficult. Example of bonuses are “Pickpocket: swap one of your cards with one of the same category from another players’ hand” and “Mission impossible: the next round will be played with two missions cards”.
We piloted Tiles Cards in a small design workshop with nine students with IT background. The goal of the workshop was to understand whether information imprinted on cards were easily understandable. Only primitive cards were used. We briefly explained to participants the content of the cards and asked them to design a collaborative game using objects, input and output primitives. We let the users play with the cards and observed their design outcomes (Figure 3).
The tool was well accepted by users. In particular, we noticed that cards well served the role of triggers for discussions. Unconventional associations of objects, input and outputs added an element of fun and creativity. On the contrary, we observed several challenges that need to be addressed in future work. Most of the idea developed were quite trivial and lacked of creativity. Besides in this study game cards, which could have improved the depth of idea produced, were not used; we need to better understand what are the factors that enable idea generation to grow in complexity and to be grounded in users’ needs. Further, the cards didn’t support the investigation of a domain-specific space. Mission card provided guidelines that apply to multiple domains, even if blank cards can be personalized with domain-specific missions. We will consider adding cards bringing domain-specific dynamics (e.g. learning objectives) into the game. Primitive cards were well understood by users whose, we underline, had an IT background. We need need to verify whether primitives have the same degree of acceptance among other user groups.
We observed that the users needed more guidance, for example it wasn’t clear how several primitives can be combined together or whether there are exclusion criteria for some of those. We are considering adding a cardboard with placeholders and visual guidance for the association of the different card types.
Finally, we need to understand how the outcome of the
design process could support moving into a prototyping
phase, and how the ideas generated can be
implemented with the help of technology toolkits. In
this perspective we are in the process of developing
technology tools to implement primitive cards with
software and hardware tools [
We presented Tiles Card, a card-based game to include end-users in the design practice of ecosystem of smart objects. Tiles cards serves both the role of (i) making knowledge in field of IoT and tangible interfaces accessible to non-expert and (ii) fostering end-user inclusion in the design process by leveraging card game mechanics. Our first pilot study showed a good user acceptance for the tool, highlighting potentialities and limitations. We are in the process of revising the cards to address the limitations encountered during our pilot study and we are planning new workshops to test both primitive and game cards. Future works will investigate how to support the transition between design and prototyping phases by providing technology tools to implement the interaction primitives described on cards.
This work is co-funded by the Norsk Design- og arkitektursenter under the Design Driven Innovation programme and by NTNU Technology Transfer AS. We thank all our pilot study participants.