Designing Smart Things: User Experience Design for Networked Devices

The wide availability of many different kinds of network-connected digital devices—from tablets to TVs to bathroom scales and cars—raises deep questions about how to design user experiences for and with those devices. In this workshop Mike Kuniavsky, author of Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, will introduce you to concepts of user experience design for the post-PC/post-phone world.

How do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?

Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, Mike will describe underlying trends, show the latest developments and ask some broader questions. As a group, we will analyze the big hits and disasters to uncover what makes a successful ubiquitous computing user experience, and what doesn’t.

This workshop will introduce both fundamental concepts of ubiquitous computing user experience design and specific techniques for designing services and interfaces.

Topics covered will include:

• Design for multiple scales
• Design for services used by multiple devices
• Rethinking everyday objects and experiences
• Understanding use context
• Hardware/software mashups
• Sketching in hardware

Expect hands-on design explorations, group ideation and the opportunity to make the abstract future of user experience design a little more concrete.