Hasta La Ideas

Detail of an XBee module in a prototype for the Tweet-a-Watt, a hacked wireless home-power monitoring system by Ladyada. Source: Flickr

One weekend this past July, an invitation-only group of 40 artists, designers, and researchers from design hotspots and leading institutions such as IDEO, Microsoft Research, NYU, Stanford, Umeå Institute of Design, Wired Magazine UK, and Yamaha, among others (complete list here), gathered in an (almost) secret location in London. During the fourth-annual Sketching In Hardware Conference (SH09), three big-impact themes emerged: tools to support the design of better, more complex experiences; the challenges of open innovation; and the basic conditions for open devices to become a reality

Jan Borchers, head of the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University , demonstrates the LumiNet.

What is Sketching in Hardware?
The napkin sketch is the lingua franca of all design. We all do it because—hundreds of years since we started doing it—it’s still the best way to get inspired, to get unstuck, to get real.

Until recently, electronic-device design has been sprinting up the steep incline of Moore’s Law. Our ability to conceptualize early ideas is tripping on its shoelaces. It’s hard to simplify the inherent dynamism of an electronic device—no matter how elaborate the margin doodle; it often confuses more than clarifies. And how could it not? Electronic devices are alive and interactive. They gather information about their environment or user, process values, and respond accordingly. Even the most well-intentioned sketch quickly reaches the limitations of the medium.

If a sketch of a static device can be thought of as a noun, a sketch of an electronic device must be closer to a verb. So while a designer can create storyboards to determine whether a phone should vibrate under specific conditions, like the intensity of light in a given space, to get a feeling for what that really means, a working device—a sketch model—needs to be built.

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