Abstract
There is a well-established culture of early prototyping
when designing digital interactive systems, such as paper
prototyping and wireframe methods. The culture of
designing physical objects is somewhat different: early
explorations of form is still prototyped via 2D sketches or
renderings, but - mostly because of the construction effort
involved - prototyping of actual physical objects is deferred
to later stages. The problem occurs when designing mixed
physical-digital systems, such as tangible user interfaces
(TUI) on interactive surfaces: the high degree of
interactivity means that early prototyping is vital, yet there
is no viable process for prototyping both the physical and
digital aspects simultaneously on a low-fidelity (low-fi)
level.
Our solution is Paperbox, a toolkit for exploring design
ideas for tangible interaction on interactive surfaces. It
supports the early exploration of different form factors and
immediately provides digital interactivity for the lowfidelity
TUI prototypes built with it. We observed our
toolkit in use in various settings: as a brainstorming tool by
junior designers; in the development of a consumer
electronics product in a large industrial company by senior
designers; and in a usability study comparing the effect of
different levels of fidelity on the outcome. The lessons
learnt will enable others to replicate and extend our
approach.
Refereed
No
