Background

I am a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), based in Beijing, China. Prior to joining MSRA in 2008, I spent seven years at the University of Cambridge, first obtaining my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Management Studies, before completing my PhD dissertation in the Rainbow Group at the Computer Laboratory, under the supervision of Alan Blackwell.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in helping to realize a future where computation is embedded in the fabric of everyday life, work, and play. By bringing computation out of “computers” and into the world, I aim to give people the freedom to augment their environment with new kinds of physical, digital, and social interaction capabilities. One way in which this can be achieved is through tangibility – using physical objects to stand for digital information.

In my PhD dissertation, Tangible User Interfaces for Peripheral Interaction, I describe how this notion of tangibility can be applied to the office context, using poker-chip styled physical tokens to represent items of common interest within co-located work groups: tasks, documents, and one another. Users can freely arrange such tokens throughout their environment, extending the physical-digital frontier away from their normal centre of attention – their monitor – and into the spatial and social contexts of their desktop and beyond.

The digital content of such tokens can be accessed by placing them on a personal interactive surface located to the side of each user’s existing workstation. Interaction with tokens is not session-based but episodic, performed as an activity that is auxiliary to the user’s primary focus. I call this concept “peripheral interaction”. In the office context, this kind of interaction allows people to update and share task progress and document content in parallel with the ongoing performance of their primary work tasks.

Building on their ability to represent and control digital information, such tokens also fulfil broader cognitive and social functions: how these digitally-augmented physical objects are created, annotated, arranged, presented, discussed, and exchanged all contribute to the meaning that they hold for those people who use them. Moreover, the fact that “tangibility doesn’t scale” means that users can’t just create physical tokens for all of the digital information they might ever want to access. In the words of one of the participants in my PhD study, “You have to choose what's most important at that point in time”.

In an ever expanding universe of digital content, we can use tangibility to represent the things of importance to us, keeping us mindful of those things as we go about our activities, and giving us a direct means of both accessing those things and sharing them with others. In my current research, I am applying these perspectives to the design of interfaces that combine the expressive power of tangibility with the communication potential of the Internet, to create compelling interactive experiences that bring people together in joint engagement with, through, and around technology.

PhD Dissertation

Tangible User Interfaces for Peripheral Interaction (2008). Darren Edge. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory [pdf]

Peripheral Interaction with Tangibles (2007). Darren Edge. Job Talk, Microsoft Research Asia [ppt]

Journal Publications

Correlates of the Cognitive Dimensions for Tangible User Interface (2006). Darren Edge & Alan Blackwell. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (JVLC), 17(4), 366–394 [pdf]

Using Solid Diagrams for Tangible Interface Prototyping (2005). Alan Blackwell, Darren Edge, Lorisa Dubuc, Jennifer Rode, Mark Stringer & Eleanor Toye. IEEE Journal of Pervasive Computing, 4(4): 74–77 [pdf]

Conference & Workshop Papers

A Solid Diagram Metaphor for Tangible Interaction (2007). Alan Blackwell, Cecily Morrison & Darren Edge. Position paper at CHI’07 Workshop on Tangible User Interfaces in Context and Theory, San Jose, CA: 28 April 2007 [pdf]

Tangible Interaction in a Mobile Context (2007). Alan Blackwell, Gareth Bailey, Ignas Budvytis, Vincent Chen, Luke Church, Lorisa Dubuc, Darren Edge, Mattias Linnap, Vilius Naudziunas, Hugh Warrington. Position paper at CHI’07 Workshop on Tangible User Interfaces in Context and Theory, San Jose, CA: 28 April 2007 [pdf]

The Physical World as an Abstract Interface (2006). Darren Edge, Alan Blackwell & Lorisa Dubuc. Contemporary Ergonomics, PD Bust (Ed.): 224–228 [pdf]

A Tangible User Interface for Peripheral Task Management (2006). Darren Edge. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC): 228–229

TUIs to Ease: Tangible User Interfaces in Assistive Technology (2006). Lorisa Dubuc & Darren Edge. Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT), Cambridge, UK: 10–12 April 2006

Cognitive Dimensions Tradeoffs in Tangible User Interface Design (2005). Darren Edge & Alan Blackwell. Position paper at the Cognitive Dimensions 10th Anniversary Workshop, Dallas, TX: 24 September 2005

Last Updated: 03 July 2008