The ColorTable

The paper describes the design story of the ColorTable, a tangible user interface in support of urban planners and diverse stakeholders collaboratively envisioning urban change, which was developed in an iterative process of design-evaluation-feedback-redesign in a series of workshops with users in the context of real urban planning projects. It seeks to clarify a number of more general design issues related to tangible user interfaces -- how to make use of material and spatial properties in designing both, physical interface and multiple and simultaneous interactions; how to handle the complexity of urban projects while keeping interfaces and interactions simple and transparent.