To counteract the increased tendency in skill learning addressing our cognitive abilities we discuss an opportunity on how performance skills can be trained by means of inherent feed forward through interactive materiality. We address this approach in the context of designing an interactive toothbrush that supports users in learning a complex brushing technique by relying solely on their perceptual motor skills. We discuss how we designed a natural coupling according to the Frogger framework in the action-perception loops with the interactive toothbrush. We evaluated the toothbrush in context. The experimental results indicate that complex movements can be learned by providing inherent feed forward on the actions of users in skill training. This supports our argument and vision that the design-inspired approach or interactive materiality may offer new opportunities for behavioral transformation.

In this paper, we present a study of the effects of structural holds and rigidity of a flexible display on touch pointing and dragging performance. We discuss an observational study in which we collected common holds used when pointing on a mockup paper display. We also measured the force patterns each hold generated within the display surface. We analyzed this data to produce 3 force zones in the display for each of the four most frequently observed holds: the grip zone, rigid zone, and the flexible zone. We report on an empirical evaluation in which we compared the efficiency of pointing and dragging operations between holds, and between structural zones within holds, using a real flexible Lumalive display. Results suggest that structural force distributions in a flexible display affect the Index of Performance of both pointing and dragging tasks, irrespective of hold, with rigid parts of the display yielding a 12% average performance gain over flexible areas.