TUI Analysis of Pico: From Two Frameworks

I chose to analyze PICO from Fishkin's taxonomy framework and Professor's Shaer's RBI framework. Essentially, PICO is a way to rapidly prototype optimal cellphone tower placement. The towers are represented by disks on a tabletop that are magnetically controlled by programmed software constraints or user applied constraints like rubber bands or barrier between disks.

Fishkin:
The embodiment (how closely the input is tied to the output is) is full because it based on tactile feedback of the PICO pieces and thus, the output device is the same as the input device. The PICO piece also employ the metaphor of noun and verb because each PICO piece represents a cellphone tower and moving the pieces are like rearranging the cellphone towers. Because of these metaphors, the PICO pieces are also tokens.

Shaer: 

PICO is rooted in a reality based interaction framework. It is certainly post-WIMP (beyond the point of point and click) and does ease the cognitive load. It mirrors the spatial placement of cellphone towers and adds digital authenticity with the physicality of the data manipulation. As a tool to rapidly prototype cellphone tower placement for optimization, it employs the themes of naïve physics and environment awareness and skills. Because of the user’s informal knowledge of the physical world and naïve understanding of physics, she can understand how the PICO pieces exist and interact based on the mechanical constraints placed upon them. Her environment awareness and skills allow her to use PICO as the augmented reality in which she can rapidly prototype cellphone tower placement and understand and manipulate this environment.

The tradeoffs are expressive power for efficiency and practicality. The user is able to rearrange her PICO pieces under the software constraints and her own mechanical constraints. She can express a huge variety of scenarios with many constraints, but the protyping is not scalable for hundreds of towers and the need for many differently sized constraints is critical yet impractical.