Wearable Crazy Eights: Wearable Ideation Methods for Encouraging Divergent Design Concepts

Abstract

Participatory design with wearable users entails engaging people in the design process from the early ideation phases. However, user-generated wearable concepts are often limited by the narrow design space of commercially available wearables. This paper presents an ideation scaffolding method we developed for eliciting wearable concepts, called Wearable Crazy Eights, where participants used an ideation deck and sketched up to 8 concepts in 8 minutes. Herein, we discuss the artifacts produced from our ideation method in a study with 46 participants comparing 3 groups. By comparing the 3 groups we were able to parse the effects of each activity on the resulting ideas. Our contribution is a replicable and customizable ideation method for encouraging outside-the-box thinking in wearable studies.