Rapid Prototyping for Ubiquitous Computing

Davies, N., Landay, J., Hudson, S., and Schmidt, A. Guest editors’ introduction: Rapid prototyping for ubiquitous computing. Pervasive Computing, IEEE 4, 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2005), 15– 17.

The authors suggest that, as in earlier HCI efforts, the progress in prototyping methods and tools is central overcome the barriers to widespread development and deployment of ubicomp. Rapid prototyping techniques can partially solve the current dilemma of researchers and developers who must concentrate on their specific area to advance technology rather than expend effort on broad system-implementation issues. Low-fidelity prototyping can adapt to the pervasive computing requirements and proves to be an essential means to address the questions about user performance and user acceptance.

This paper serves as introduction to Prototypes in the Wild: Lessons from Three Ubicomp Systems.

Relation to my thesis: A useful ref for my “in sitiu” approach of location-aware system evaluation. Actually, the authors describe it as:

Research shows that prototyping and deploying systems for study is important to understanding how systems fit into the user’s world and how they can be used effectively. Designing, building, and deploying systems help both researchers and developers better understand a particular application domain’s key issues. This issue provides a rich body of experience in issues associated with prototype deployment.