Experience prototyping for designing smart environments

Abstract

Designing smart environments involving various intelligent devices has become popular. Rapid and iterative prototyping of user experiences is necessary for the early smart environment design. However, effectively building smart environment prototypes is challenging, especially in the early design phases. The smart environments involve large physical spaces, multiple components that communicate with each other, and the diverse users who experience them. The goal of this research is to investigate the methods and tools for experience prototyping--including exploration, development, and the delivery of ideas--in the early design phases of designing smart environments. In this dissertation, I propose a prototyping system, SketchStudio, that would support experience prototyping for smart environments.

SketchStudio enables the exploration and delivery of experiences in smart environments with 2.5D interactive scenarios. The system allows designers to rapidly construct virtual environments and intuitively specify users' spatiotemporal journeys for scenarios. The system produces animated scenarios, consisting of 2D sketches and 3D human characters, based on the defined journey and reviews them from omniscient and third-person viewpoints. SketchStudio can reproduce experiences in imaginary smart environments by rendering the scenarios in immersive virtual reality. After the iterative design and development processes, the system was deployed in the public domain to support various prototyping activities in the wild. The studies with design practitioners and researchers revealed that SketchStudio facilitated the rapid creation and iterative concretization of multiple experiential aspects, including space- and interface-level interactions. Animated scenarios created with SketchStudio demonstrated various conceptual smart environments--involving various interactions among people, space, products, and mobile devices.

The proposed prototyping system successfully supported experience prototyping for smart environment design in the early conceptual phases. This dissertation contributes to design and human-computer interaction with through proposing SketchStudio, an artifact enabling experience prototyping in the context of designing smart environment. It also extends the knowledge of how an animated scenario-based tool can affect designers' activities. The prototyping tool and its development process will benefit the human-computer interaction and design in terms of future design subjects.