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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Committee: Ali Mazalek (advisor), Michael Nitsche, Tim Welsh, Sanjay Chandrasekharan, and Hugh Crawford
Abstract
Space is an important component of digital media criticism and has been discussed from several perspectives including the design of video game spaces, interactions, and information architecture. Recent research from the fields of cognitive science and psychology has shown strong links between the body and different aspects of spatial cognition, such as perception, navigation, and mental representation. As the realm of digital media design has expanded the ways that interfaces engage the body, new opportunities for the exploitation of the spatial affordance of digital media have become possible. By analyzing tangible and embodied interfaces (TEI) from a spatial cognition perspective, I have defined a design space and a set of guidelines for interfaces that support, augment, and alter spatial cognition through the design of embodied interactions and spatially focused interventions.
In this dissertation, I present the necessary background information and analysis of TEI systems to define the design space that encompasses this research. I then present a set of guidelines, drawn from two case studies for the design of tangible and embodied interfaces that engage spatial cognition.
