Activity theory and the practice of design: evaluation of a collaborative tangible user interface

BUILD-IT is a Tangible User Interface (TUI) developed to facilitate collaboration between a group of designers or planners seated around a table. We briefly describe a task analysis conducted to determine what the target users of the system do in the course of their work. The responses provided by 16 potential users are summarised as design insights. The system designed to facilitate dealing with these tasks, described in more detail by Rauterberg et al. and Fjeld et al., is then outlined. The remaining sections of the paper present an informal evaluation of BUILD-IT consisting of the first author's responses to questions selected from the Activity Checklist devised by Kaptelinin et al. The relationship between BUILD-IT and activity theory is a theme throughout the paper since tangible bricks – physical objects which users manipulate – bring behavioural ("objective") elements of activity particularly close to the decision-making, cognitive ("subjective") elements of activity involved in planning and design.