Abstract
Wearables are constantly becoming more present in our daily lives. Paired with our smartphones and smart homes, wearable devices such as smartwatches and earpieces are aimed to support our endeavors; though at times they invade our personal lives to the point where our communication with the outside world is mostly through these products. Therefore, for our graduate industrial design studio course at Arizona State University, we have set out to design wearable technology products that take all life forms’ well-being into account for the future. We benefited from trend research, design fiction, speculation, wizard of Oz techniques, and concept-knowledge mapping. Prototyping was one of the key methods used to discover how to lead the design propositions for this student project. Master of Industrial Design (MID) students at Arizona State University during Fall 2022 were asked to build– but more importantly, think– with their hands and turn their tacit knowledge and imagination into wearables that will help and care for the end-users. This paper will illustrate the design process used in the studio and how different levels of prototyping helped the MID students’ “think with their hands” and how it allowed the abstract notion of designing for the future to turn into a concrete understanding of creating life-centered designs.
Keywords
Prototyping, Design Futures, Wearable Technology, Speculative Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.152
Citation
Gumus Ciftci, H.,and Plymire, K.(2023) Think with your hands: Exploring the Future via Prototyping, in Silvia Ferraris, Valentina Rognoli, Nithikul Nimkulrat (eds.), EKSIG 2023: From Abstractness to Concreteness – experiential knowledge and the role of prototypes in design research, 19–20 June 2023, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.152
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Think with your hands: Exploring the Future via Prototyping
Wearables are constantly becoming more present in our daily lives. Paired with our smartphones and smart homes, wearable devices such as smartwatches and earpieces are aimed to support our endeavors; though at times they invade our personal lives to the point where our communication with the outside world is mostly through these products. Therefore, for our graduate industrial design studio course at Arizona State University, we have set out to design wearable technology products that take all life forms’ well-being into account for the future. We benefited from trend research, design fiction, speculation, wizard of Oz techniques, and concept-knowledge mapping. Prototyping was one of the key methods used to discover how to lead the design propositions for this student project. Master of Industrial Design (MID) students at Arizona State University during Fall 2022 were asked to build– but more importantly, think– with their hands and turn their tacit knowledge and imagination into wearables that will help and care for the end-users. This paper will illustrate the design process used in the studio and how different levels of prototyping helped the MID students’ “think with their hands” and how it allowed the abstract notion of designing for the future to turn into a concrete understanding of creating life-centered designs.