Designing for the Internet of Things

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models and prototypes. Animation, electronics, 3 D printing, and inter-
active programming are all necessary parts of the designer’s repertoire
when working with emerging technologies and twenty-first century
products.
Tools traditionally thought of as the domain of engineers, data scien-
tists, and hackers are now entering the designer’s toolbox. For example,
a designer working with emerging technologies such as sensor net-
works, data collection, and microcontrollers benefits greatly by learn-
ing some basic electronics. Being able to put together a quick proto-
type by using a platform such as Arduino means that the designer can
experiment with the possibilities available to him based on the types
of sensors and data at his disposal. Even if the final product will use
a different engineering solution, this basic toolset gives designers the
capability to model the interactions, data, and physical aspects of a new
product at a high level, and with practice, at a detailed level.
Working with large and complex data sets is becoming the norm for
designers working on new products. This data can come from custom
collectors, such as sensors embedded in products, or from the tangle of
information available through web services. When working with large
data sets, there is no substitute for working with the data itself. Tools
such as Processing or JavaScript and the browser canvas object provide
an easy way to start creating rich interactive visualizations from any
data.
Rapid fabrication starts to shift industrial design away from being
industrial and back to a more artisanal craft. Designers can now imag-
ine a new physical form, model it with traditional tools such as clay, do
a digital CAD drawing, and have it fabricated in plastic or metal within
a few hours. This facilitates a kind of rapid iteration and prototyping
for complex objects that would have been difficult 10 years ago. It also
allows for small run production; whereas purely artisan craftspeople
could produce only a few objects, and industrial production could only
produce high volumes of objects, these new methods make it possible
for designers to produce dozens of objects, each the same or slightly
different.
These methods can be thought of as a similar process to industrial
designers making clay or paper models, or architects using foam-core
to make scale models of a new building. None of these things is analo-
gous to the final form, but they are hands-on ways of exploring integral