The Tactile Advantage: Designing Tangible Interfaces for the AI Era

The more content is generated for us, the more it is worth holding something real. People arrive at live events with little attention to spare and a growing suspicion about what is real and what is generated. The one thing an event can offer that a feed can’t is something physical: an object to touch, turn, plug in or push. Done well, a tangible interface does three jobs. It gets people to approach, it helps them remember, and it makes an abstract idea feel concrete. That is the tactile advantage, and it is what the creative technology team at Sparks designs for.

Attention is the currency. Trust is precious.

Every experience we design competes with a screen that has already trained people to move on. About a quarter of tracks played on Spotify are skipped within five seconds.² Microsoft’s workplace data show the average worker interrupted roughly every two minutes.³ And Gloria Mark’s research puts the average time a person stays on one screen at 47 seconds, down from 75 seconds in 2012.⁴

Generated content raises the stakes. In a Gartner survey of 1,539 US consumers, half said they prefer brands that avoid generative AI in consumer-facing content, and 68% said they frequently wonder whether the content and information they see is real.⁵

For live events, that is an opening. People come to an event expecting the experience to be more authentic than their feed. That is an unfair advantage for our industry, if we use it in the right way.

The physical object still wins

Vinyl is the clearest proof. US vinyl sales have grown for 19 straight years, to roughly 47 million records in 2025, and annual revenue has passed $1 billion.¹ What people are buying is the experience: the record out of its sleeve, the needle dropped, and, typically, side A heard all the way through, as the artist intended. Same music, different object, different experience.

Why hands-on works

Memory. People remember what they do better than what they only hear or read. A 2022 meta-analysis of 145 behavioral studies spanning roughly six decades found a large enactment effect for performing an action versus verbal-only learning (g = 1.23, where 0.8 and above counts as large). Correcting for publication bias brings that figure to about 0.84, which is still large by the same convention.⁶ Hands also help us think. In studies of Tetris players at UC San Diego, rotating a piece on screen took about 100 milliseconds, against 800 to 1,200 milliseconds to rotate it in the head, so players turn pieces to see where they fit instead of imagining it.⁷

Approach. Getting people to step up is the first hurdle at an event, and physical interfaces clear it. At the Museum of Science in Boston, researchers built Robot Park, an exhibit for programming a robot in two versions, one with a mouse and screen and one with physical blocks. The block version drew more visitors and more group participation.⁸ In a separate study from Reichman University, 62.1% of 58 participants chose the tangible version and 34.5% chose the screen when offered both.⁹ Notice what these results do and don’t show. People choose physical interfaces and join in. They don’t necessarily learn more. That is still the job of an installation: to get people through the door.

Ownership. Touch changes how people relate to objects. Peck and Shu found that touching an object increases how much people feel they own it.¹⁰ In Harvard research on the “IKEA effect,” people were willing to pay about 63% more for a storage box they had assembled themselves than for a preassembled one, though the effect faded when they didn’t get to finish the build or had to take it apart.¹¹

Flow and affordance. When an experience feels like a game, people lose track of time. That takes a clear goal, instant feedback, and a challenge matched to the person’s skill, neither too hard nor too long. And when an object clearly invites use, visitors don’t have to guess what to do, which leaves more of their attention for the story.

There is a caveat, and it matters. Physical interaction is not magic on its own. People can remember the thing they touched better than the message it was meant to carry. The interaction has to be the idea, not decoration. In short: doing beats reading, hands help us think, and a clear physical interface lets the message be the focus.

The physical mechanism is the handshake

On our team, we think of the physical mechanism as the handshake: the moment a visitor meets a digital experience, where both the type of input and its emotional weight matter. There is no single right answer, but across our projects the mechanisms tend to fall into three families.

Immersive momentum. Wheels, sliders and cranks suit ideas about scale: scrubbing through a timeline, moving through a large data set, or explaining something bigger than one screen can hold. When someone is moving their arms, the idea feels big.

Decisive action. Buttons, switches and plugs. A choice on a touchscreen can feel temporary or easy to undo, while pressing a button or plugging something in makes the choice feel made. At ServiceNow’s Knowledge 25, we built a lit tube that visitors grab and plug in. It snaps into place, the light and animation change, and the installation shows what happens when you connect a data source to an AI workflow. An abstract concept becomes something to do, with an immediate result.

Invisible magic. Here the environment itself responds. Elements move, or sensors in the space pick up a visitor’s presence and change the surroundings. In our work for Netflix FYSEE, an installation themed to Wednesday rotates a sculpture when a visitor snaps twice over a book.

Many projects span more than one family, and the best often combine them. The more important discipline is the order of operations: start with the message, then find the mechanic that serves it. Too many briefs start from the end result, such as “we want a game” or “we want a touchscreen,” and the first job becomes going back to ask what the client is really trying to communicate.

In practice at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026

In early conversations about ServiceNow’s agentic AI platform, the client kept describing orchestration that happens behind the scenes, which users never need to see because the interface stays clean. But attendees needed to understand that all the connected data sits inside a governed, secure system. Our team landed on a slider, like the before-and-after photo scrubbers on websites, but at human scale. Moving it reveals what’s under the hood, literally under your hand. Everyone already knows how a slider works, which is affordance doing its job.

From idea to installation

An idea like the slider is only the start. Making the interaction feel right is an engineering and fabrication problem. We look for the sensor that gives the most instant feedback, with no lag, so the installation feels responsive. We work out how it fits into the structure, design the control mechanism, and develop control drawings with the fabrication team. Then it goes into shop testing, where we document how it performs and refine the interface round by round.

The goal is that by the time hundreds of people are using it on site, every detail has been thought through: the tuning, the tension, the materiality of the handle. And because live events are full of distractions, we don’t leave installations unattended and hope people engage. We staff our activations so someone is on hand to help visitors get started, and it makes a big difference.

Five design principles for the tactile advantage

1. Find the metaphor. Listen closely, whether to the product team’s download or to your client, for the idea that keeps repeating and will bring the message to life. That leads you to the object you’ll build.
2. Design for affordance. It has to look usable and draw people in. Test it on people who haven’t used it before.
3. Design for groups. Make it social. When more people can interact at once, you get more throughput and more interaction.
4. Make it feel good. It should respond immediately, and people should know how to use it.
5. Measure understanding. Many teams track only badge scans or how many people went through. Ask people at the end whether they understand the concept better than when they arrived. Measurement is a discipline we take seriously at Sparks: for Xbox at Gamescom 2025, we quantified the return on the activation at 11x.

Be clear about what you want people to remember, then give them something to hold onto.

Frequently Asked Questions

Creative Technology at Sparks

Sparks is an experiential marketing agency that designs and produces brand experiences for live events. Creative technology is one of its services: Sparks’ creative technology team designs and builds interactive and tangible-interface installations, from the initial concept and design development  through hardware design, software development, fabrication and shop testing to on-site deployment. Recent work includes Netflix FYSEE, ServiceNow’s Knowledge conferences and Xbox at Gamescom 2025.

References