This thesis seeks to advance interaction design practice by exploring the potential of interactive tangible prototypes to enhance university students' understanding of abstract programming structures, such as loops. It addresses prevalent challenges, including the difficulties students encounter when initially learning about loops, and scalability issues inherent in tangible teaching tools within this research area. Two distinct tangible learning methodologies are considered: unplugged programming and tangible computing. The primary contributions of this thesis lie in the creation of innovative tangible learning tools, the emphasis on the scalability of such tools, and the illumination of how physical prototypes can inspire digital software design.

As the population of the world increases and cities grow in size, we are faced with remarkable societal problems regarding sustainable food security for the generations to come. In this paper, I present and discuss HAVE (Hydroponic Agricultural Vertical Environment), a research-through-design project that explores the design of an interactive open-source vertical kitchen garden. HAVE is designed as a shareable platform, that aims to lower the barriers of entry of getting started with home gardening, to provide an option for people to play an active role in working towards a more sustainable, resilient society. By simplifying the design of a computer-assisted garden, I present an engaging interactive system that is cheap and easy to build and maintain. With HAVE as a case study, this project also aims to expand upon how plant-based interfaces can be implemented in future design work, and builds upon the topics of calm technology and material computing. As such, this paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of designing plant-based interfaces, also in relation to how people care for and interact with plants. It is my hope, that HAVE may act as a conversation piece that addresses societal challenges regarding future agriculture practices, while contributing to the academic discussion and debate on the topics of plant-based interfaces, design for social innovation, and tangible computing, and the field of interaction design in general.

Seating is an integral part of work environment. When people are at work, they often sit in chairs for long periods of time without changing postures. This results in reduced blood circulation in the body, especially in the buttock-thigh area causing muscle fatigue, pain and discomfort. Ergonomically designed task chairs adopt a passive approach to guiding people into better postures by providing adjustability inside the chair. However most people do not adjust their chairs because they fail to sense the need for changing posture. They are left to sensing the need to change posture through guesswork or extreme discomfort. This thesis proposes a new system to address this problem by sensing static posture in a seated person with the use of electronic sensors embedded in the seat, and by providing interactive feedback to static posture via sound, light and tactile channels. The new technology is an sensing-feedback mechanism embedded in a chair, that allows people to receive postural information and make body adjustments periodically to avoid pain and discomfort caused by prolonged seating.The feedback mechanism was tested with four subjects to determine its efficacy in generating posture change through pressure relief and user feedback was gathered in order to design the final prototype.

This project has been devoted to design a computer system with a tangible user interface, in the context of future supervision of remote drop-in dialysis patients. The tangible computer system was developed as an example of how two concepts in human work, accountability and awareness, can be supported through tangible user interfaces. A current trend within CSCW discusses accountability in design in terms of how software should make its own actions accountable. We choose to use an alternative route, namely to use the tangible interface for explicating nurses and patients actions for each other. Explicating actions is key benefit with a tangible interface in work environments that is physical co-located. We conclude that our strategy can be investigated further in settings where the work is carried out in a physical co-located space.