Grasping Science: Designing Tangible and Embodied Interactions for the Computational Sciences

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The goal of this research program is to design, develop, and evaluate tangible and embodied interfaces that facilitate the manipulation and interpretation of large and/or complex data sets. The specific focus is on interface design to support computational science practices, and the research program thus builds on the PI’s ongoing work with biochemical engineering and computational genomics researchers. We propose that the growing area of human-computer interaction (HCI) research known as tangible and embodied interaction (TEI) offers unique opportunities for enhancing research practices and discovery in the computational sciences. This is based on the increasing body of evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience, which shows that sensory and motor processes play an important role in cognitive processes, such as scientific reasoning and problem solving. However, interactions with computational simulations and large/complex data sets currently make only limited use of the motor system, as these interactions remain constrained by mainstream human-computer interfaces like keyboards/mice and, more recently, touch interaction. In contrast, TEI employs physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as controls and representations for digital information, supporting joint engagement of motor, perceptual and cognitive processes in interaction with computational systems. We further propose that the need for innovative interfaces that can enhance discovery processes involving large and/or complex datasets presents an opportunity to drive forward the field of TEI. The TEI community has suggested that the field needs to take on more complex problems and computation. Yet, significant limitations for TEI remain, and the research area has not yet addressed scale and complexity at the magnitude applied in areas of computational science. The contributions of the research program include developing a fundamental understanding of how TEI can support research practices and processes in specific computational science domains; the design, development, and evaluation of prototypes of these interfaces that can be applied in practice; and the formulation of a design framework that can aid HCI designers and researchers in creating systems to support computational science practices. The program will advance the field of TEI by addressing problems that have not yet been addressed by the field due to their complexity and/or scale, but that can benefit from TEI techniques. More broadly, the computational sciences are critical to scientific and technological advancement in Canada, and the design framework developed in this research program will serve as a practical guide for creating tools that have the potential to better facilitate the ability of computational scientists to solve difficult yet societally critical scientific problems in areas such as biochemical systems and genomics.