Challenges
As students, we wanted to create a product that would help us manage our deadlines and complicated workload.
While most of us used a mobile-app to keep up with deadlines and tasks, we wanted to step away from traditional digital interfaces and design a tangible user interface.
Solution
A tangible version of the Kanban board to bring task and project management directly to the desk-top. We wanted to design rich interactions while still remaining simple in concept.
We designed this system to be modular and extendable so that it may be used in multiple configurations.
Process
Sketch of the blocks, bases and the interactions between them.
Components
There are two main components in our design, the task blocks and the task bases.
1. Task Blocks
They are programmed with information regarding individual tasks including a title, description, and estimated complexity. The blocks have 3 different sizes that visually distinguish between tasks of differing difficulty.
2. Task Base
It is used to categorize groups of tasks and display summative information regarding the stack of tasks. These could be configured based on the user’s preferred workflow. The example we demonstrate categorizes tasks as “To Do”, “In Progress”, or “Done”. Tasks can be reordered on the base to suggest relative priority among the stack.
We used cardboard, paper, and acrylic paint to create our low fidelity prototype.
Teaser video showing most interactions.
We utilized some stop motion techniques to demonstrate traversal of menus and interactions.
In Collaboration with: Rizky Risman, Max Oppenheimer and Youssef Diab
