Experiencing technology before it exists : a case study

Ubiquitous and wearable computing have been around for more than a decade now [15]. However, there is still no consensus on what the new technologies are going to be used for. Traditionally, application development in ubiquitous and wearable computing communities has been mostly technology driven. This has lead to a variety of applications of which only few are really being used in practice, e.g. [2, 4, 6]. This may be seen as an indication that current practices are too unsystematic and rely too much on developers’ and designers’ intuition alone. We found that there is a latent tension between a technologically advanced solution and the focus on the user. For the introduction of advanced new technologies, such as ubiquitous or wearable computing, users usually cannot be familiar with this new opportunities and often have difficulties realizing its benefit 1. Simultaneously, designers and developers often lack the understanding of the relevant issues in specific working domains. In order to create solutions that really go beyond incremental changes of established routines, these limiting boundaries have to be overcome: Real innovation is not generated by technology itself, but technology can act as a vehicle to create new opportunities that innovate and change established routines and work practices. This paper consists of three main sections. Section 2 lists and discusses a set of requirements which, in our experience, help to introduce and generate new applications that aim to depart radically from today’s work practices. Section 3 describes the notion of X’treme Prototypes as a method to generate innovative applications. Prototypes, referred to as X’treme Prototypes, are used as vehicles to provide a grasp of how future implementations could look like regardless of their immediate feasibility. Finally, section 4 reflects on how well the X’treme Prototype method fulfills the initially posed requirements.