Building on the ideas developed in the Datablocks project and trying to address its main shortcoming - namely, the difficulty to handle larger datasets -, a tangible user interface for navigating and accessing the entire TIME magazine database was designed. It was demoed as a design case at ISEA.
    Three tokens are used for navigating through all the issues. One token represents the issue’s decade, another the year and the last the month. Moving the token along the table’s X axis chooses between the available selections. The fourth and last token selects the desired issue and lets the user flip through its pages by rotating the token.
    This tangible user interface design could be extrapolated to browsing other large periodical collections or datasets.

Code