In the physical world, products and services are traditionally distinguished from each other on the basis of tangibility and intangibility; indeed, services are often described as intangible products. This distinction has governed the design and management of both. In the virtual world of the fixed and mobile Internet, however, this distinction is no longer appropriate: both products and servic...

To study the cognitive role that tangible objects play in design thinking, we gave 17 architects and novice students a set of blocks and asked them to design their dream house. Although the blocks seem simple they are filled with perceptual surprises. We regard manipulating blocks as a form of physical thinking because through interaction designers increase the dimensionality of their design sp...

Digitization of information, the rise of the World Wide Web, and the development of new means for information creation, production and dissemination place new strains on the legal infrastructure of copyright laws in the United States. Review of the historical trends in copyright protection, focusing on changing socio-technical relations in the information production environment, uncovers five c...

Studies of prefrontal cortex (PFC) lesion patients suggest that information conveying high immediacy, certainty, or tangibility engages the more posterior part of the PFC, whereas information that is more abstract or complex engages the anterior part. We examined whether the anterior and posterior subdivisions of the PFC have distinct roles in processing temporal information during decision mak...

Active Learning in the classroom domain presents an interesting case for integrating physical and digital affordances. Traditional physical handouts and transparencies are giving way to new digital slides and PCs, but the fully digital systems still lag behind the physical artifacts in many aspects such as readability and tangibility. To better understand the interplay between physical and digi...

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory endowments they make less self-interested choices then when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose common "house money" e ects into two components: the tangibility of cash in hand relative to mone...

Operations management is a large segment which is concerned with the existence of any organization. Every organization has an operations function to produce some type of products and/or services. It is well-known that manufacturing differs from service provision in many aspects. The main difference between products and services would be tangibility. While the outputs of manufacturing are tangib...

For decades the importance of background situations has been documented across all areas of cognition. Nevertheless, theories of concepts generally ignore background situations, focusing largely on bottom-up, stimulus-based processing. Furthermore, empirical research on concepts typically ignores background situations, not incorporating them into experimental designs. A selective review of rele...

Little is known about the effects of the level of fulfillment of the IT professional’s psychological contract on their innovative work and organizational citizenship behaviors. Using psychological contract and social information processing theories, this article proposes to answer the research question: How does the level of fulfillment of the IT professionals’ psychological contract affect the...

We developed a tangible entertainment system that enables to play video game with physical collectibles as game components. It consists of a capsule toy vending machine with LCD panel, capsule toys with embedded RFID tags, an RFID sensor board and a computer. Nowadays a huge amount of collectibles is sold: baseball cards, dollhouse miniatures, character figures, candy tins, and so on. Usually, ...