I’ve always been kind of obsessed with interacting with abstract digital ideas using simple physical metaphors. One of my recent projects in this space has recently gotten some press coverage from Fast Company, so I thought that I’d share and offer a bit more detail.

A bowl with physical “pebbles” can be a more intuitive way of managing complex settings.

The issue is that there are lot of complex settings with many facets that are a pain to manage by using checkboxes in a settings panel. I use privacy as an example in a system I call “Availabowls.” Currently, the granularity allowed for specifying availability is often a bit all-or-none, but there may be a lot of nuances in how you want to manage access to self. For example:

• I may want to be seen as available to some people/groups and not others
• I may want to be contactable via some technologies and not others
• I may want to specify a level of busyness between “available” and “not available” and let the sender decide if they’re issue is important enough to disrupt me

It would be a nightmare to manage each of these settings in a control panel every time I come home. Literally, I have nightmares where I’m swarmed by radio boxes and checkbox panels! Instead, I imagine that a physical token can be used to represent a specific setting. For example, pebbles represent one unit of “busyness,” small blocks represent people or groups of people, plastic tokens represent communication media. Now, to set my privacy settings, I just have to transfer objects between a green bowl (on) and a red bowl (off) when I get home. There’s more about all this in the Fast Company article.

But really, I imagine that a physical pebble-and-bowl system of this sort could be useful for other complex settings. For example, pebbles may represent separate elements of my security system, making it easy to dis/arm everything but also easy to just leave specific elements disarmed (e.g., the back door while I’m having a family BBQ). Or they may represent different eco-friendly subroutines in the house such as ones that turn off lights in un-used rooms, control the house temperature, outdoor sprinklers, etc., again allowing me to only pick the things that I really want to have on right now.

Advantages? I think this is easier to deal with than checkbox panels. It’s easier to have a pebble-and-bowl system “live” where you would most likely be making these changes (e.g., by the front door) than a computer or a tablet. It doesn’t feel like a computer, so it won’t freak out grandma. It’s glanceable or even potentially eyes-free if each pebble has a unique shape.

Disadvantages? There’s only one physical pebble-and-bowl object and I see no elegant way to be able to sync states with this object if you wanted to make changes to your settings remotely or if you wanted to have multiples of these in a big house.

Is this something that appeals to others? Or am I unique in my checkbox-panel-phobia?