Conceptual models represent social and technical aspects of the world relevant to a variety of technical and non-technical stakehold- ers. To build these models, knowledge might have to be collected from domain experts who are rarely modelling experts and don't usually have the time or desire to learn a modelling language. We investigate an app- roach to overcome this challenge by using physical tokens to represent the conceptual model. We call the resulting models tangible models. We illustrate this idea by creating a tangible representation of a socio- technical modelling language and provide initial evidence of the relative usability and utility of tangible versus abstract modelling. We discuss psychological and social theories that could explain these observations and discuss generalizability and scalability of the approach.