Are designers ready for ubiquitous computing?: a formative study

Ubiquitous computing is increasingly becoming reality, even for people outside of research. A group that will have to face the challenges of this new technology is product and industrial designers. To get a designer's view of ubiquitous computing, we demonstrated the Smart-Its ubiquitous computing prototyping platform to 16 product designers and collected their impressions during a workshop. Our results show that the way designers approach technology differs from that of researchers, which indicates the need for more comprehensive workshops.