Collaborative design prototyping tool for hardware software integrated information appliances

Abstract

Simple and rapid prototyping is important for collaborative design where end users are involved in the design process from the early phase. This paper presents a collaborative design prototyping tool for hardware software integrated information appliances, such as mobile phones and digital cameras. It supports the collaboration between designers and users for identification of user needs and evaluation of design. The tool consists of STCtools (State Transition Chart tools) software, hardware modeling materials, physical user interface toolkits for software hardware integration, and Augmented Reality desk (ARdesk) for interactive simulation. STCtools allow users to prototype the behavioral aspect of information appliances using states and events. Using the hardware modeling materials and the physical user interface toolkit, designers and end-users explore hardware aspects together. ARdesk is a workbench where the interactive sketch display is projected onto an invisible paper marker of the hardware model using the projection based augmented reality technique. Three collaborative design workshops of designing a portable device for theme park users were accomplished with the prototyping tool for qualitative evaluation. The results suggested that the tool supported collaborative design by iterative concept development and active interactions between designers and end users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.