Crafting Tangible Interfaces for Human Digestion: Unpacking the Research through Design Prototyping Journey

This pictorial unpacks the prototyping journey of Digestive Tumble - a tangible system that demonstrates the processes involved in the human digestive system. The system aims to support awareness of our digestive processes and help users to make informed decisions about their dietary choices. Digestive Tumble consists of nine modules, where the modules visualise a unique stage of the digestion. The system represents the digestion of five major food groups: grains, meat, vegetables, fruits and dairy through colourful tokens. Users interact with the system by inserting tokens representing their meal. These tokens transform into colourful beads, which then traverse through different modules to show the digestion of the given meal. We reflect upon the steps involved in visualising an internal bodily process through a tangible system. We hope that our design reflection will inspire future systems on visualising other internal bodily processes to support body learning through everyday reflection.