Keeping up appearances: interpretation of tangible artifact design

  • Authors:

  • Marigo Heijboer;Elise van den Hoven

  • Affiliations:

  • Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Eindhoven University of Technology, MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The design and interaction of physical game artifacts is becoming increasingly important for the design of digital tabletop games. In this paper a study is described investigating the differences in interpretations of realistic and abstract game artifacts comparing children and adults. A game was created on a digital tabletop as a carrier for the user evaluation presented in this paper. The appearance of the game artifacts was explored and a family of each of the artifacts was created. The interpretations of each of the individual artifacts and their different visual appearances were tested to determine whether children rank and interpret the functionalities of the artifacts differently than adults. The results showed that overall the understanding of abstract artifacts compared to realistic ones was best for both children and adults. It also indicated there was no significant difference in the interpretations of the realistic and abstract artifacts between children and adults.