Towards a Material Landscape of TUIs, Through the Lens of the TEI Proceedings 2008-2019.

Materials play an influential role in determining the way people interact with and experience objects. This impact is particularly important to TUI designers, as the artefacts they design often afford grasping and physical manipulation. As the ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction moves through its second decade, we sought to survey past proceedings to present a picture of the material choices for TUI design. In this paper we present an exhaustive survey of these proceedings and discuss insights revealed on TUI material trends. Our findings include highlighting the most popular materials choices, as well as the high percentage of materials that have only been used once throughout the years. Furthermore, we make recommendations on the future use of, and reporting on materials choice for TUI design and point toward future work that is needed to fully map the material landscape of TUIs.