This paper presents our research toward the design and development of a library of electronic hardware modules called Blades and Tiles. Interaction hardware design with blades and tiles provides researchers with considerable flexibility in iterating their designs, decoupling between the domains of electronics, software, firmware and mechanical design. Our approach has been driven by design objectives including hardware reusability, reliability, scalability, and flexibility.We have created a library of blades and tiles, and used them to develop several interaction devices. We present both conceptual and applied aspects and discuss future directions.

We introduce core tangibles: physical interaction elements which serve common roles across a variety of tangible and embedded interfaces. We describe two such tangibles: tangible menus and interaction trays. These may be composed together to dynamically bind discrete and continuous interactors to various digital behaviors. We discuss our approach, implementation, and early usage experiences.

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