The abundance of easily captured digital media and storing everything "just in case" has made it difficult for people to revisit them and have a rich reminiscence experience. To reinstate this value, we developed Slide2Remember, a wall photo frame enabling people to re-encounter their histories of digital photos and music. By physically sliding the device's front cover, users can hear songs that they had listened to in the same period when the photo was taken. From our four-week in-field study with 7 participants, we showed how Slide2Remember supported narrative remembering experiences of past moments and found detailed roles of each medium in the recall of life events. Moreover, the sliding interaction encouraged participants to begin their retrospection with anticipation and curiosity. Our findings imply considerations for providing a new recalling experience by overlaying one digital possession type over another and ways to encounter past data in everyday living spaces.

When expressing personal data on the displays of personal IoT devices, it is important to be intuitively aware of privacy settings and perform ready-to-hand interactions to respond appropriately to various situations occurring in shared spaces. In this paper, we developed Posit, an interactive calendar in which the disclosure level of schedule content can be changed in three stages according to the object's placement by the user. The results of our three-week in-field study with six participants revealed that Posit's interaction was considered to be a simple way of hiding personal schedules quickly, and we could identify the roles of the positional messages in determining the others’ gazes on displays. Additionally, we confirmed that social relationships and trust between colleagues affect the use of Posit. Our findings imply new opportunities in designing interactions for the management of personal privacy by applying physical state-changing interaction and understanding social factors in shared spaces.

Abstract Adopting a re-materialization approach, we designed and implemented an everyday interactive artifact that enables an individual to monitor and establish the reconfirmation time of email data. This device represents a new means of handling and interacting with email. To investigate the value of the materialization of email data through a daily interactive object, Maili, we conducted a 1-month field study with five participants in their work environments. The results showed that applying physicality to email handling helped to increase accessibility to and interest in the data, as well as in the reconfirmation function of email. Results also indicated the value of combining non-digital (the tray) with digital functions. By presenting the process of using the dematerialized data, our findings offer new insights into how we can materialize digital information in everyday tangible artifacts.

We introduce Monomizo, a tangible daily and monthly calendar in a concrete-casted desktop object that allows users to print out their daily schedules. Monomizo was designed to integrate the benefits of digital and paper-based scheduling by providing easy conversion of schedules in digital devices to analog media (e.g., paper). To investigate users' schedule management experience with Monomizo, we conducted an in-field study of 10 participants over 6 days. The results showed that Monomizo helped users to review and reflect on the day via the screen and through attaching, writing, and physically possessing printed schedules. We also found value in encountering digital information through analog-metaphoric design that provides ambient permeation of schedules. Based on the findings, our study offers new possibilities for designing a tangible artifact that facilitates users' effective planning and use of their days.

The experience of sound may be seen as fleeting or ephemeral, as it naturally disperses through space in waveforms unless recorded by media. We designed muRedder to reinstate the ephemerality of sound by shredding a song ticket that embeds a sound source while playing the song simultaneously. In this study, we explored ordinary music listening activities by turning intangible music content into tangible artefacts, making the music unable to be replayed, and representing the sound-fading process by shredding the ticket. We conducted a field study with 10 participants over seven days. The results showed that muRedder enabled users to focus solely on the music content and to actively find times to enjoy the music. We also found that limitedness of the media draws prudent decision in selecting music. By showing the process of consuming the invisible auditory content in a way that is tangibly perceivable, our findings imply new value for slow consumption of digital content and musical participation in public spaces.

We introduce Traffico, a tangible timetable representing dematerialized schedule and transportation information. It delivers a user's schedules in chronological order along with transportation information between schedules. Placed on the user's desk, Traffico suggests required transportation times using four options-walking, bicycling, bussing, and driving a car-and through an e-ink display. To investigate the advantages that Traffico provides to users, we conducted an in-field study of 10 participants over five days. The results revealed that Traffico supports the planning of moving times in a day through displaying transportation options on each schedule. We also found that Traffico provides better schedule reminders with event notifications in a sequential order, along with rotating interaction for checking events. Through this type of tangible interaction, Traffico provides possibilities to reflect dematerialized digital information into a physical form and to adopt a new way of scheduling and handling time.