TINK - sketching product experiences of connected objects

52 - TINK
Design directions
From the research on IoT products, it
emerged that category 6 (networks of
interconnected objects) is the least
explored: While the topic of creating an
infrastructure to connect products one
to the other in order to leverage the
full potential of IoT application is very
relevant within the IoT community 39 , very
few project, between the one analysed,
go in the direction of creating network of
interconnected objects.
Several reasons can be discovered behind
this:
• The level of complexity of this kind of
system is quite high.
• No design tools have been designed
to sketch this type of products.
• Prototyping networks of objects can
be quite expensive in terms of money
and time since multiple objects have
to be prototyped in order for the
network behaviour to appear.
My project will try to address those
problems; The tool I’m going to design
will therefore assist designers building
experiential prototype of networks of
interconnected products.
This doesn’t mean that the tool won’t be
used for the development of IoT products
from other categories. Networks of objects
in fact can embed all the communication
flows characterising of the other categories.
The tool will be a software solution
that will assist interaction designers
in developing experiential prototype of
connected objects.
The software will support the development
of physical interactive prototyping, and it
will work in combination with a hardware
platform.
The chosen board will have a direct
connection to the Internet. This
connection layout might not be the most
optimal one for every project, especially
considering the higher costs of equipping
a prototyping board with this kind of
connection. However this connection
layout will provide enough flexibility to
develop all kind of experiential prototype
of connected object.