Physical prototyping of social products through end-user development

Abstract

This paper presents a web-based toolkit that facilitates the physical prototyping of social products. Social products are a new generation of consumer products (e.g., clocks or umbrellas) that exhibit the ability to socially interact with their users via a variety of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. The toolkit has been built around three main activities that product designers perform in the physical prototyping of social products: (a) designing the appearance and behavior of the physical object; (b) implementing the code associated with the physical object; and, (c) testing if the physical object behaves as expected. Because the target users of the toolkit are not expert in software programming, an End-User Development (EUD) environment has been developed, which aims at facilitating the ideation process and providing simple mechanisms for automatic code generation and testing.