Merrill and Kalanithi were surrounded by colleagues at the Media Lab who were working on wireless sensor networks (e.g. the Tribble project,[1]) and tangible user interfaces (e.g. Topobo [2]).
Merrill and Kalanithi wanted to create a general-purpose tangible user interface that leveraged the technologies of wireless sensor networks.
The initial applications envisioned for Siftables were organizing personal media (digital photos, songs, videos) and facilitating business processes, such as coordinating people, distributing tasks, and creating Gantt charts.
Merrill was invited to present Siftables at the 2009 TED Conference, held in Long Beach / Palm Springs February 3–7, 2009.
During his talk, he demonstrated several applications on Siftables: portraits that reacted to being placed next to one another, mixing colors from "paint buckets" on adjacent cubes, building the Fibonacci sequence with an arithmetic application, creating words by arranging individual letters, an interactive graphical narrative for children, and constructing a music sequence.