Loaded Dice

This work was a team effort of the wonderful Miteinander research group of which I was principal investigator from 2014 to 2019 at TU Chemnitz. People seem to like these interactive cubes. We regularly conduct co-design workshops with Loaded Dice and we have published widely about them, at ACM DIS, ACM CHI, RtD Conference and they have been featured twice in ACM interactions.

What is the Internet of Things equivalent to a pen or a hammer? In designing Loaded Dice, we wanted to create an ambiguous, tangible, and ready-to-use co-design tool for the Internet of Things. Loaded Dice is a set of connected cubes equipped with sensors in one cube and actuators in the other. It makes abstract Internet of Things technology tangible and easily reconfigurable. Taken alone, it is an ideation device to support co-designing scenarios for smart connected things. Together with design methods tailored to the tool, it is used to co-design more complex storylines together with older adults, people living together, or blind students.

Die Loaded Dice sind ein Werkzeug zum Entwurf von Szenarien rund um das Internet der Dinge (IoT). Sie bestehen aus zwei Würfeln, einem Sensorwürfel, der sechs verschiedene Sachen messen kann und einem Aktuatorwürfel, der sechs verschiedene Ausgaben besitzt. So können Ton in Licht, Licht in Temperatur, Temperatur in Bewegung umgewandelt und erfahrbar werden. Durch unsere Werkzeuge können auch Laien Szenarien für ihren Umgang mit IoT entwerfen und so gewonnene Lösungen mit uns in echte Produkte umsetzen.

Arne Berger, William Odom, Michael Storz, Andreas Bischof, Albrecht Kurze, and Eva Hornecker. 2019. The Inflatable Cat: Idiosyncratic Ideation of Smart Objects for the Home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300631

Kevin Lefeuvre, Sören Totzauer, Andreas Bischof, Albrecht Kurze, Michael Storz, Lisa Ullmann, and Arne Berger. 2016. Loaded Dice: Exploring the Design Space of Connected Devices with Blind and Visually Impaired People. In Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’16). https://doi.org/10.1145/2971485.2971524