Tools that Tell Tales: Bridging Context Seams by Digitally Annotating Physical Artifacts

In this paper we describe our method for supporting artifact-centered communication. We elaborate a design space we have been elaborating called Tools That Tell Tales, and describe the TackTales prototype which provides an instance in this design space. We show how paper postings on a community pin board can be augmented to enable conversations around the physical, paper postings. The TackTales prototype uses modified radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to establish the link between paper postings and the online communication, bridging a seam between artifacts and conversation and activity as annotation. We suggest that our approach can be a ubiquitous computing alternative to the design of general-purpose communication devices and propose artifact-centered communication as a meaningful conversational annotation.