Aim and Classification

Imagined by Jonathan Cohen and Meg Withgott and Philippe Piernot, Logjam is a system for video logging. The source of inspiration for the authors to design such a system is to find back in 1994. During this summer a group of video ethnographers accompanied a band on a US tour and shot several hundred of hours of interviews and interesting segments of society. Back to their research lab, the ethnographers had to categorize and comments this huge amount of video fragments.
This is where Cohen, Withgott and Piernot, first came out with the idea of logging aided by a tangible user interface empowering group interactions. Their TUI aims not to replace but to augment conversation using a set of physical tools permitting to focus on the dialog rather than on the computer artifacts.
To achieve this goal the three scientists imagined an interface comprising of a computer-enabled game-board and a set of footpedals. The former is equipped with small tokens representing the various possible categories of video extracts whereas the latter serves for video speed control. Additionally, a classical GUI offers some further (and more classical) media manipulating functionalities.
Because the tokens are associated with digital information (video) one could imagine this system as being a relational TUI. However, since the tokens have no relation to each other, classifying it a an associative user interface is probably a better approach.