Finally I found the time to update my little lab project called “notabene”.  So this version (0.2) actually is a fully functional prototype. But let’s move on and face the facts:

Things we’ve added

• All your stuff is now stored in a database
  notabene utilizes the new HTML5 database capabilities of Mobile Safari to store all the data locally on your iPad in an SQL-Database.
• Full offline support
  This is done through a cache manifest and the database stuff. So now if you leave and revisit the webapp you’ll be right back where you left. Even if you’re not connected to the internet…
• You can now add, delete and switch between walls

Give it a test drive

Just point your iPad to the following location and play around with it.

Please keep in mind: This is still a playground!

This app is still a prototype for showcasing the capabilities of web applications. It might not be a good idea to store valuable data with it.

What did we learn?

• Performance is even more important for a touch UI than it is for desktop apps. So if a new feature ruins your overal performance you might consider to just kick it.
• Webfonts don’t work in offline mode on iOs – This is really a downer and Apple should fix these kind of things.
• Storing stuff in the Webkit database feels pretty old school. We need new tools and frameworks for this.  For example CouchDB seems like an interesting way out of this mess.

Related stuff going on

• The mobile web community is really pushing the boundaries of mobile browsers right now and people are innovating in that space.
• Sencha Touch, a great framework for mobile touch applications, has been released lately.
• jQuery Mobile is also on its way

Sources available – Feel free to remix

Again, the full source code of this project is available under MIT License. So feel free to remix and drop us a line if you feel inspired …

Intuity’s LabTalks recently featured Hamburg based URW++, our longtime partner for font development. Peter Rosenfeld and Dr. Jürgen Willrodt gave us insight in the adventure of designing a global font. The foundry’s classic Nimbus Sans now holds around 45.000 characters in 7 different weights. What a tremendous challenge to create a coherent style that meets the requirements of such different cultural areas like Europe, Asia and the Arab World. It’s been particularly interesting to get a glimpse at the foundry’s competence for dealing with complex scripts found for example in India, China or Japan.

But isn’t this asking to much of a single font family? It’s obvious that a global font cannot cover every typographic subtlety in detail like its fully developed “single culture” cousins do. I guess expecting this wouldn’t be fair, considering that global fonts are growing along the unicode standard. Nevertheless it’s already possible to define different lookups of a character (yet unfortunately not coherently for different systems and software). Besides URW++ is collaborating with native speakers in developing their global font. Thus it’s plausible that the result matches the particular aesthetic tradition of its cultural context.

In the end it’s all about building bridges. Using one single, integrated font familiy instead of multiple isolated equivalents is a real benefit for companies that are going global.

Last week it finally arrived at the office: Our long awaited iPad. No question that we took the chance to play with this cute device …

The goal: Learn about rapid prototyping on the iPad with HTML5

Our goal was to explore the possibilities of the new device, especially its browser as Objective-C is really a painful environment (at least for me) when it comes to fast prototyping. So we wanted to know: Can we use HTML as prototyping platform for future projects? How far can we push the boundaries of the browser? Can we make a webapp behave just like a native app?

The result: notabene  – An infinite workbench for ideas

Music: “One Shot” by Luc Bartoli (Powered by Jamendo)

The result of our trial is a little prototype that hopefully makes you forget that your using a browser. It utilizes jQuery library to add the behaviour but takes full adavantage of CSS transitions to speed up performance. We also use new CSS features like gradients, a new box model (to center the breadcrumbs) plus animation and transform capabilities. And of course just like our previous experiment it is possible to install it as a full screen app on your home screen to make it feel more native. If you own an iPad or got the Simulator installed you can give it a test drive. (Keep in mind: This is just an experiment, things won’t get stored and the menu in portrait mode is just a mockup)

What did we learn?

Some of this stuff wasn’t that easy. We came across several problems but also faced new possibilities that we’d like to share:

• It proved to be a valid approach for building simple touch prototypes
• It’s a look to the future
  If performance of Javascript and Browser engines will continue to speed up this approach will become even more valid and might soon be seen as a real competition to native apps.
• Development with CSS transitions can be random
  Sometimes a little tweak in your CSS will just blow up your app for no reason. So if Apple really wants to embrace HTML5 as a mobile UI technology it needs to tackle this issue and make Mobile Safari even more rock solid.
• Performance, performance, perfomance
  We did several iterations until we got to the current performance, especially for dragging the little notes. You really have to reach the speed of a native app. Otherwise the interaction just doesn’t feel right. In order to do so use CSS transitions and iPhone OS touch events (touchstart, touchmove) instead of the traditional events (click, mousedown). This will speed up the performance of your interface significantly.
• You can even do multitouch in the browser now
• Not for sissies: multitouch on bigger screens is a smeary thing. After using the screen for some 10 minutes you definitely long for a cleaning tissue.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

In order to get this experiment done we used some great Open Source components. So we’d like to give some shout outs and credits to the projects that luckily did a lot of hard work to create the building blocks of notabene:

• jQTouch by David Kaneda as an inspiration
  We used the transition approach of this great library as a base for the slide transition.
• Swipe Plugin by Ryan Scherf
  We used the plugin as a basis to build a swipe gesture detection plugin for jQuery
• Delicious Font by Jos Buivenga
  We’ve used the extraordinary Delicous font in combination with the @font-tag to add a little extra spice to the UI.

Sources available – Feel free to remix

The source code of this project is available under the MIT License. So feel free to remix! Drop us a line if you feel inspired …

Next steps

What to do next? Well, at the current state the project is a rough experiment but we’re thinking about taking it a step further. Any help, contribution and ideas are deeply appreciated. Just a few thoughts on improvement:

• Building a backend
  Cloud syncing is really the thing that would make these notes superior to paper notes. Also the offline database capabilities of Webkit could serve as temporary database.
• Additional input techniques
  Currently the software keyboard for adding new notes is not really satisfying. Voice input would be great but could be hard to implement.
• Improving the UI & adding true multitouch support

In any way we’re quite happy with the result and curious to get some feedback. To be continued…

Photo by bovinity

I’ve been crashing my MacBook with a software update this week. Horrible stuff! But hey, that’s life. Well, actually it’s not! I’ve thought about this for some time now but this ‘accident’ literally has been the last stroke that broke the camel’s back. This article is not meant to be a conclusion to this problem but more like a starting-point for a discussion about this issue. The hint to a problem that might actually hit us harder than we might think: We have to stop wasting our time by updating software.

It’s an exponential thing

Well, let’s just have a look at an example. As I carry an Android-Phone in my pocket with several very useful apps it is nearly impossible to face a day without the phone reminding me of an app that needs to be updated. So as a consumer I’m really stuck in mess here. On the one hand I want apps that are up to date that include the latest security fixes and so on. But on the other hand I don’t want to waste my time updating a todo list application on my silly phone. And let’s face it: the app store model might become an even more dominant consumer application platform for all of us.

So this might soon be even an exponential problem. Because the same stuff applies to …

• Firefox extensions
• Adobe updates
• iPhone Apps
• Add your favorite time killer …

Time’s important

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to complain about this stuff but actually I’d rather draw our attention to an important issue while we’re currently facing this shift: We have to be more conscious about not wasting the time of our customers. We have to value their time. And in my opinion updating software shouldn’t even waste a single minute of my day.

A possible way out: The web model

Actually for me it all comes down to the web again. The web model seems like a possible way out of this update mess. I like this established approach of self-contained applications that care about themselves. I never had to worry about updating Mindmeister or Gmail. Actually that’s why I prefer the Twitter mobile website over a native client on my phone.

I still believe in a more ‘webbish’ OS-approach for the mobile space which Apple had in mind when launching the iPhone and Palm evolved even further with its Web-OS. Of course there are other things to consider here (e.g. offline support, access to hardware etc.). But I think some pretty smart guys (e.g. the Webkit Team) are currently working hard on fixing this by pushing the limits of the browser. In the meantime I’ll keep keep on updating…

Kurt Weidemann @ intuity

It was a honor and pleasure to have Kurt Weidemann visiting us in December. Even more this year, as he came back bringing an interesting speech about the role of design in our society and the attitude of designers to create an positive impact. His plea for receiver-oriented communication (instead of sender oriented) is a current issue. Transferred to our field (designing innovative products and services with a great UX) it’s a guideline for focus and simplicity.

We’re very lucky being able to work on strategic research projects together with our customers. However these circumstances often put us in a position where it’s not possible to share our designs, outcomes and findings with the rest of the world. But sometimes we can. That’s exactly what happened to a project we did back in 2007 for Mercedes Benz.

A new Navigation Experience for Daimler AG

Inspired by the concept of flight shows we set out to design a new navigation and entertainment experience especially for Mercedes Benz passengers sitting on the backseat. The concept integrates online and offline content in a smart way as an ambient flow of information you can choose to follow or just ignore. You are also able to interact with the system to find out more about your journey and points of interest along your route. Thus, the concept is merging navigation and (rear)seat entertainment.
During concept development, we have been documenting parts of our vision as a short video, created in collaboration with our motion design partners at Studio Soi.

Enough of words! More on the project can be found on our corporate website. We’re curious to get some feedback.

Due to lots of interesting stuff to do and heavy multitasking I haven’t had the time recently to sit down and write. But thankx to an application called OmmWriter I managed to escape the evil world of multitasking and to write this little article here exactly about this topic. These are my thoughts on multitaksing, simplification and their relationship to Apple’s latest product.

1. People complaining

Reading through the Future Shock article by Fraser Spiers I started asking myself why people are complaining about the lack of multitasking on the iPad? I have to admit that I’ve been running with this pack. But after living on an Android Phone for about a year now, after using Single-Task-Oriented Software like WriteRoom, Ommwriter, etc. I changed my mind. So maybe the lack of multitasking is one of the most brilliant features of the iPad.

2. A little bit of history

For years we’ve been complaining about the desktop metaphore (multiple windows, folder based file system, task bar, add crazy stuff here) and how hard it is for ‘normal’ people to understand. These symbols and metaphors might have been important in the early days of computing but the world has changed a bit since then.

I remember reading the book Interface Culture by Steven Johnson back in 1999 where he actually talked about the same topic: Why are we still bound to folders and the desktop? Most kids don’t even know what a folder is. But it seemed like the computer industry didn’t have the guts to get rid of it, to get rid of complexity, to get rid of features. For years we’ve been ‘oppressed’ by managing multiple tasks and windows simultainiously. Now we’ve been given the chance to leave that behind. And how do we react? We complain about it.

3. How Apple managed to leave the desktop behind

Apple has managed to do an incredible thing. We’ve constantly been pushed away from the desktop without noticing it. Starting for example with applications like iPhoto. It lets us forget about the file system and helps us to organize photos in a human way. Similar things happened to music and the iPod. The next important step was the rollout of a phone with a Single-Task-Oriented Interface which introduced  the idea of this kind of ‘reduced’ environment (based on small widgets/apps). Now this ecosystem is being expanded to the iPad. I’m not saying that this is the most revolutionary product ever. But it’s a another step in a constant move of innovation and simplification. A move away from multitasking, away from the desktop.

“Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.”
- The Unix Philosophy (via mnmal)

Let’s sum this up and get outta here…

So I guess this in a important step for people getting back the control over technology. It’s about giving people less options but more control over their lifes.

I am very proud to announce the latest book of our two Intuity fellows Benedikt Groß and Hartmut Bohnacker. Besides of the great approach to generative design and step by step instructions for coding – This is one of the most beautiful books I have seen for a long time.

– Markus

––––––––––––––––––snip––––––––––––––––––

The term Generative Design describes a design method which is implemented in various design fields (Art, Architecture, Communication Design, Product Design). Thereby the most essential is that the output – image, sound, architectural models, animation – is generated by a set of rules or an algorithm.

A book focused on the designer’s point of view

About 2,5 years ago Julia Laub and me got together as we were thrilled by the possibilities of this domain. We decided to use our Diploma (Generative Systems) to dive into its essentials and its underlying algorithms. A year later Hartmut Bohnacker and Claudius Lazzeroni teamed up and with the help of Verlag Hermann Schmidt we were finally able to share our thoughts and findings with the rest of the world in form of a book. »Generative Gestaltung« tries to focus especially on the designer’s point of view: the creation of images and visualisations by using code.

Visualizing ideas by using code

Image are no longer created manually but through a visual idea which is translated into rules and then implemented in a programming language in the form of source code. The result is a piece of software which hopefully creates the desired images or even permutations. To cut a long story short: design is created by coding software instead of using software. Sounds a bit abstract, hu? So what can actually be done with? Here a few possible fields of application and a related best practice examples.

• Information Visualisations: Eigenfactor
  Eigenfactor is a interactive visualizations to explore citation patterns between scientific journals. The goal is “to map the structure of science”.
• Corporate Design: COP15
  Generative identity for COP15 the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen in 2009. The logo Consists of 192 lines, one pr. member of the United Nations, conceiving the concept of “a world in continuous dynamic chaos unifying to the ideal constellation – a state of perfect balance”.
• Art & Photography: extracts of local distance
  Existing architectural photography are merged into multilayered shapes. The resulting collages introduce a third abstract point of view next to the original ones of architect and photographer.
• Rapid Prototyping / Fabbing / Fabrication: Reflection
  Reflection is a CNC-milled sound data sculpture, inspired by a musical piece by Frans de Waard.

… etc, there are a lot more, but i hope you see the potential.

Transforming signals and noise into information and knowledge

My motivation (as one of the authors of »Generative Gestaltung«) was to provide a solid foundation for others on how this modified design process can be used. Or in other words to empower people to do projects like the ones above.

Because still a lot of designers think that coding is geeky and complicated stuff. But in my opinion it’s a powerful tool that fuels creative solutions and will help us to solve future problems. Generative Design will become more and more important in order to turn the growing numbers of signals and noise into useful information and knowledge.

A foundation to build upon

Last but not least you can get the complete source code as we’ve made it available under an Open Source License. You can grab them from the website that supports the book. We would be glad if you let us know of your experiments, ideas and explorations that might arise from our little seeds.

Generative Gestaltung
Designing, Programming, Visualizing with processing
Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Groß, Julia Laub, Claudius Lazzeroni (Ed.)
publishes by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz
ISBN 978-3-87439-759-9
www.generative-gestaltung.de

Prototyping is sometimes a fiddly thing. For example getting data from Arduino into AS3 usually turns into a real odyssee hence Flash cannot do serial connections due to security restrictions.

Up to now, there are three steps to make Arduino talk to Flash: After sending the data from Arduino to a serial port (1) you need to use a serial socket proxy to send it to a network port (2). In AS3 you finally have to use a socket library to parse the data (3).
(see: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Flash)

How easy would it be if you received simple to handle keyboardEvents from a prototyped input device without destroying a USB keyboard to get some wires in…

1. What we’ve done
We tought our Arduino boards to swindle! They pretend to be USB Keyboards now. For rapid prototyping we produced a series of brutally simple and easy to use Arduino shields based on the instructions found here:
http://code.rancidbacon.com/ProjectArduinoUSB

The Arduino code requires the library ‘UsbKeyboard’ from
http://code.rancidbacon.com/ProjectArduinoUSB

2. What is it good for
- rapid arduino prototyping without serial socket stuff (saves many many lines of code)
- interface with software that was never intended to be controlled by external custom hardware
- create your own USB devices
- Easy and fast prototyping, countless applications
- runs on (almost) every computer without installing drivers or additional software

3. Disadvantages
- slow when sending long values

4. Download
- Feel free to etch your own board
Download etchable PDF
(Intuity is NOT responsible for any damage!)

Every weekend in the US alone, 100 million person hours are spent watching TV adverts – the same amount of time it took to create and edit the 2.5 million encyclopedia entries on Wikipedia. If only a fraction of this spare brainpower could instead be channelled into simple online tasks that help science, the contribution would be enormous. (New Scientist, 2008)

GWAP: a game with a purpose
Recently I accidentally found a very interesting topic: online games that use the possibilities of the human brain to solve uncomputable problems like labeling images or hard computable problems like the folding of protein structures. One more proof to the fun theory. What excited me, is the brilliant idea to disguise a scientific problem as a game and let all parties benefit from that initiative.

The game foldit, which is taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions.

A lot of spare brainpower
On the one hand, people invest a lot of brainpower in games, due to natural human qualities such as the desire to be quicker, to achieve higher scores than others or the necessity to prove themselves by resolving a logical task. I am sure that after several hours spent on the computer, everyone stands up with the feeling that he has just invested too much time in meaningless activities. Now people can have fun playing games with a purpose without having such a bad conscience :)

A lot of uncomputable problems
On the other hand, scientists need brainpower to resolve particular problems, on which the human brain still surpasses the computers. Volunteer projects have the problem, that they are supported mainly by those, who are really interested in that topic and want to contribute to the cause. Games, however, enthuse quickly and are played by a lot more people: people who do not have necessarily a passion for that particular topic. Now scientists can get their results much faster and for free, so science is progressing due to the collective help of millions of people!

Online games with a purpose and volunteer projects
Currently there are maybe not as many and not so sophisticated examples in the network. But here are some of them, so you can enhance your spare time if you don’t know what to do. You can:
- label images to improve search engines by playing phetch or the famous ESP Game,
- train different artificial intelligence systems at gwap.com,
- fold protein structures and help biologists to design drugs,
- help astronomers to classify galaxies,
- help digitalizing old books and newspapers, whereas this last one is not designed so much as a game, but more as a free service → also a very clever idea!

My hope is, however, that in future there will be a lot more games with a purpose, and playing will be no longer a waste of time, but a meaningful work!

Language based interfaces are hip right now. Both iPhone and Android OS recently have been equipped with the ability to listen to your talk. So the technology seems to have reached a level where it’s ready to hit the consumer making it easier to communicate with certain devices and services. But the technology alone won’t do the job. It needs an appropriate interface in order for us to understand. Otherwise we won’t realise that a specific device is able to understand our commands.

For instance the Nokia N Series (N73, N80, N95 etc) has “voice recognition” included since several years but only a very few people know about that particular feature (or even use it). So we asked ourself some questions: What are the drawbacks of current voice interfaces? How can we get the human touch in language based technology? And how do we prototype these kinds of interactions in order to come up with new solutions?

1. How can we augment language based interfaces?

You talkin to me? Using a visual recipient for voice commands
One problem that we identified is the “recipient problem”: Who am I talking to? In which direction do I need to talk? Talking to a screen seems weird to us. The solution we came up with is using a metaphor. In our case a white rabbit.

Schau mir in die Augen, Kleines! Activating devices by looking at them
“The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.” 10 Heuristics of Usability

Another problem we identified: the feedback! Is the device actually listening to me right now? Will the device listen to my commands all the time? Is it active? So we came up with two modes (quiet and listening) and a simple way of switching between them: Using your eyes.

• Quiet Mode: The device is “sleeping”. Nobody is looking at it so it won’t accept voice commands
• Listening Mode: Somebody is looking at it. It’s got the attention of somebody so it will actually listen to voice commands.

2. How can we prototype language based interactions?

Our setup: a microphone, a webcam, Macspeech Dictate, Nabaztag and a bit of hacking mindset. The quick solution for our rough prototyp: use a rabbit that knows your face! We’ve ‘augmented’ our nabaztag bunny with a webcam and used a face detection algorithm trough Processing to find out when somebody is looking straight into the eyes of our little bunny.

3. The result
We captured a video in order to document the setup and two simple example implementations for voice commands.

4. What did we learn?

• Constant feedback. After the conversation was started a constant feedback from the machine is needed like: “listening”, “understanding”, “misunderstanding”, “command was done” etc.
• Language is a fascinating additional layer to interaction design but it’s certainly not the ultimate tool for interacting with devices. A lot of contexts exist where language might not be the appropriate weapon of choice
• On the other hand some things can be expressed in language very easily (see our expample in the video)
• The technology is still not that smart like the one in Star Trek, damn. But it’s definitely a big space for innovation.
• Do we need communication patterns and standards?
• Is there a need for a set of standard vocabulary which can be used when interacting with devices? For example is there a need for some kind of standard “ping”, “help” or “Hey I’m talkin to you” command? We could use it to wake up specific devices around us?

All these findings and questions seem are certainly worth to explore. We’ll keep our ears on the ground in order to check for signals and innvations that will support these kind of interactions.

Well this is interesting news!
A trio of new games were developed to make subjects like world culture, molecular biology and space exploration more accessible and fun for young minds. (Reuters)

What could be greater, than playing a game and studying your learning matter at the same time? Almost every kid hates learning and doing his homework and almost every kid plays games several hours a week. According to this article, 82 percent of the children in the United States aged 2-17 are currently gamers! So it’s reasonable to think about using games in education.

The news reminded me of the initiative I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I like this conjunction of fun and usefulness very much. And I hope I’ll find more on this subject in the future!

Photo by Nicoze (Licensed under Creative Commons)

Over 2,5 billion people all over the world cook their food over open fire, especially in the less developed countries of Africa, Asia and South America. For this purpose, firewood, petroleum or natural gas is used, which has to be imported in many countries. This is expensive and sometimes difficult to get.
But cooking over open fire involves also health problems. – About 1,6 million people die from lung diseases each year, caused by the inhalation of emissions from domestic fires (estimate by WHO).

A potential alternative is an easily producible and comfortably operated stove, which can be driven by unrefined oil from plants. Protos has been developed by the company BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH after basic research of the University of Hohenheim and in cooperation with other universities. It has been successfully tested at Leyte island in the Philippines.

Protos plant oil stove © BSH

The use of clean fuels in households of developing countries could save millions of lives. Additionally it would have positive impacts on the greenhouse gas budget. Core requirements were affordability, accessibility and availability.
Although this might not be latest news this project is a very good example of how big companies accept their responsibility: With protos, BSH uses its knowledge about home appliances and helps less developed countries to cook with an alternative, renewable energy source.

If you want to learn more about the project or you even have great ideas about how to support it, visit  the BSH protos homepage.

Graphic taken from the awesome Book Generative Gestaltung

Having recently talked about the importance of the first impression during a product experience, I’d like to share another insight on shaping experiences. A while ago I stumbled accross the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and nobel-prize winner focusing on judgement and positive phsychology. It was his peak-end rule that really got my attention. So let’s not waste time and talk about what this guideline can teach us.

What is the peak-end rule?

“According to this rule, we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Other information is not lost, but it is not used. This includes net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted.”
- Wikipedia

Michael Johnston also created a visual representation of the rule:

When to use?

After initially using this method for doing interaction design here at Intuity, I figured out that these patterns could be applied to all kinds of other experiences. Keeping my eyes open I’ve been discovering the same design patterns in all kinds of contexts from movies to a customer experience inside a coffee shop. In your day-to-day business it could be useful for…

• Shaping the experience of a digital service or product
• Shaping a customer experience in a store
• Creating workshops with customers
• Giving a presentation
• Doing a party for friends

How can we apply this rule?

• First things first – Get the overall experience right
  Sure peak and the end are important, but first of all it’s crucial to get the overal experience right. After that you can focus on setting highlights.
• Set peaks – And define a place to collect those ‘Sahnehäubchen’
  While creating an experience you should consider the peaks from time to time. Don’t force it, just try to ask yourself: How could this feature stand up/out? How could I include this joke in my presentation? Gather these little gems on a project wall in order not to forget them. Ideas of that kind tend to pop up in your mind while doing something different and they tend to be very fragile. It’s most important to catch these little butterflies and put them on a piece of paper. (Give this place a name – in our team we call this the “Sahnehäubchen” wall).
• Restrict yourself – Don’t overdo
  Trying to set peaks all the time will not result in a good product experience but rather in a product that tries to “impress” and scream at customers all the time. Nobody likes posers. The same goes for digital products. What’s more: if you try to create too many peaks the chance that you don’t get any of them right is pretty high. So focus!
• Shape a strong ending
  When designing an interface or doing a workshop, try to have the end in mind. Just try to ask yourself from time to time: How could the workshop end? How will the app look like when I shut it down? Try to design this ending as positive as possible.

The web is your friend – Inspiriations and further readings

The ‘peak-end’ rule: Can it transform your customer experience?

The Brand-Experience and the peak-end rule

Peak-End Experiences Matter Most

Music: “When waves trying to catch marvel” by Antony Raijekov (Powered by Jamendo)

These are fascinating times. We’re currently facing new challenges and projects that require a new kind of skillset for interaction designers. The tools we use to design experiences are getting more and more diverse and powerful at the same time. Actually our role as designers and our tools are changing. This led to an update of our design toolbox. It’s now equiped with a new tool: Hardware Hacking. Let’s find out why…

1. Our role: Making tomorrow’s products and ideas tangible today

In a lot of projects we are working on, our job is to make products of tomorrow tangible today. In order to design the experiences with these products and to evaluate enjoyable interaction we sketch paper prototypes, we build interactive mockups, etc. But recently amazing, additional possibilities have evolved quickly.

2. Standing on the shoulders of giants – Open Source Hard- and Software enable new possibilities for designers

The open source movement has led to a variety of interesting and new approaches to soft- and hardware design. Distributed communities create components that all of us can build upon, making it far easier to implement our ideas. Today we’re able to sketch low fidelity and high fidelity hardware prototypes without studing electrotechnology. Projects like Processing, Arduino, Phidgets, Fritzing etc. are just some of the tools you can leverage as a designer in order to tell stories and to make your ideas tangible.

3. School of Hackin’ – Creating a playground for new ideas

Massimo Banzi and the Arduino guys formed a tinkering movement in the design community. They’ve been evangelizing the hacking approach for some time now, conducting numerous workshops with design students. I think the fact that hacking as one option for creating innovation is becoming common sense these days. The whole mashup movement in web developement  is another signal for the expansion of this school of thought. Sometimes taking apart, remixing and looking at a problem without taking it too seriously is important to stumble upon new solutions to a design challenge.

4.  Sketching with human needs in mind

This creative approach to hardware hacking can get out of hands quite quickly. It’s challenging and time consuming especially in the beginning. So it’s very important for us to focus on small solutions and on human needs while sketching in hardware. With the help of this approach you’re able to create fast forward prototypes.

Conclusion: New tools to sketch extraordinary experiences

All these subjects are helping us to create extraordinairy experiences and to bring a human touch to future technologies and services. So the role of hardware hacking will increase for communicating our ideas. We’ll try to document our learnings from past and future hacking adventures as often as we can. To be continued…

The web is your friend – Check related articles

Sketching in Hardware on Core77