Abstract:

Ubiquitous computing is computing power that is integrated in devices and environments in such a way that they offer optimal support to human daily life activities. Instead of going to a single specific device at a fixed location, and explicitly formulating the information or action sought, the environment and devices sense us more or less autonomously and serve us in a proactive, unattended and hardly noticed but effective manner.

For industrial design engineering students, applying ubiquitous technologies offer a great opportunity and challenge for innovating everyday products. To teach the students about ubiquitous technologies and their application in design, we have recently done an exercise called “Innovate with ubiquitous technologies!” with more than 100 students in our Advanced Design Support-course.

In this exercise consisting of three parts, the students had to look up information about one networking technology or transmission technology and one other ubiquitous technology from the identified functional clusters: sensing, exploration and conversion. And they had to share the information found by writing about the collected information in an open content repository (WikID, our industrial design engineering wiki). In the second part of the practical exercise, the students had to create a concept for an incremental innovation of an existing product, and produce an abstract prototype of this concept. They were given a digital CAD (Computer-aided design) model of a product and they had to extend this product by applying a combination of ubiquitous technologies with the goal to improve a selected aspect such as new functionality, function and price trade off, performance, energy consumption, information richness, and/or user experience.
For instance, a student may look for and analyze an internet networking technology together with image sensing in order to create a ubiquitous bicycle pump that can identify the bike and its user, looks for information on the internet for the proper pressure and gives feedback during usage if the optimal pressure has been reached.
An abstract prototype is a short (few minutes) movie about an innovative product idea. It has a storyline in the form of a narration, which tells what the new product can do in a ubiquitous environment, and what the innovative aspects of the concept are. This narration is the basis of the abstract prototype. The second important element of the abstract prototype is an enactment (i.e. a rich visual presentation). And the third essential element in the abstract prototype is the use of augmented reality as a means to mimic the use scenario of the ubiquitous product and record the interaction with the new design.
In the third part the students had to make a cost calculation, comparing the product with and without the ubiquitous technologies.

For this exercise a design infrastructure, and a creative atmosphere triggering based on group sessions, mobile blogs, augmented reality tools, etc., have been established. We observed how ubiquitous systems, ubiquitous learning applications and design creativity support one another.

This paper reports on the way it is received by the students, and on results achieved. We present student design cases to illustrate how the exercise has been carried out and to present the students opinions on this ubiquitous learning system.

Keywords:

Ubiquitous learning system, Industrial design engineering, Case studies, Student's evaluation, Incremental innovation, Everyday products.