Morphees+: Studying Everyday Reconfigurable Objects for the Design and Taxonomy of Reconfigurable UIs

Users interact with many reconfigurable objects in daily life. These objects embed reconfigurations and shape-changing features that users are familiar with. For this reason, everyday reconfigurable objects have informed the design and taxonomy of shape changing UI. However, they have never been explored systematically. In this paper, we present a data set of 82 everyday reconfigurable objects that we collected in a workshop. We discuss how they can inspire the design of reconfigurable interfaces. We particularly focus on taxonomies of reconfigurable interfaces. Taxonomies have been suggested to help design and communication among researchers, however despite their extensive use, taxonomies are rarely evaluated. This paper analyses two established taxonomies — Rasmussen’s and Roudaut’s — using daily reconfigurable objects. We show relationships between the taxonomies and area for improvements. We propose Morphees+, a refined taxonomy based on Roudaut’s Shape Resolution Taxonomy.