Redesigning With Affordances
Process Reflection
For this project, I had a hard time with the initial steps—finding a digital product that I genuinely felt would benefit from having an affordance redesigned into something physical. But things started to flow once I asked myself: What is something I don’t like doing digitally? And the answer came very quickly, haha. As an international student who just moved, one of my main activities has been building my monthly budget and tracking all my expenses. And honestly, it’s exhausting.
I’ve tried multiple tools—apps, websites, templates, and dedicated budgeting platforms. Some are better than others, but what they all share is that they’re extremely rigid. Budgeting becomes slow and mentally draining. I ended up choosing Excel simply because it gave me the most control: it allowed me to gather all the data I wanted and organize it however I needed. But even then, every change requires revisiting cells, updating formulas, and going through multiple steps just to shift things around. Then something clicked for me. Whenever I wanted to move a pack of cells, I had to select them, drag them to the right place, and if I made the smallest mistake, I had to undo and retry. It’s just moving something, and yet it can take several seconds each time. When you add all those movements and errors together, it becomes a huge amount of wasted time. It’s just moving something. So I thought: What if those cells were physical? You could just grab them and move them to reorganize your budget instantly.
Concept — Make Your Budget Like a Board Game
You place a phone or tablet on a base, attach a small mirror that redirects the camera downward, and the device can “see” the board and the pieces you move on it. The whole idea is to turn the most time-consuming and painful part of digital budgeting into something fun, fast, and intuitive.
It would come with a set of colored blocks for you to move. Each block—depending on its color—could represent a specific quantity. You decide the quantity. Want a unique piece for a fixed amount? Scan any object you want and assign it a value. Move your pieces within regions of your board to shift money between categories, destinations, or priorities, and see real-time graphics and data on your screen.
Why This Matters
Something I’ve realized—both from this project and from readings like Gaver and Bret Victor—is that abstraction often works against us. We lose the tactile richness of interacting with the world, and with it, we lose clarity. Money and quantities are already abstract concepts by themselves; now add expenses, responsibilities, unpredictable variables, and emergencies. By giving physical form to our available monthly money and to the representations of our expenses, we can tear down one layer of abstraction, which can help us understand and make better, faster decisions. And this approach has the best of both worlds, because it still partners with on-screen charts, data, and tables.
Functional advantage: Every budgeting tool requires you to manually modify your numbers whenever something changes. If a category increases or decreases, you must update every related cell or note. With this tangible interface, you simply add or remove pieces. It becomes a lived action rather than a cognitive task. And that’s ultimately what drew me to this concept: Instead of editing formulas, you’re sculpting your budget with your hands. As you move the pieces across the board, the visualizations update instantly. You get a real sense of how your choices reshape the whole picture.
