Bringing interaction design methods and experimental technologies together into designing and developing interactive products

This study aims to design and develop interactive toys. There are fifty master and bachelor industrial design students from our institute involved in this project. This study adopts interaction design theory and experimental prototyping practices, enabling students to apply simple mechanical and electronic technology on generating interactive design concepts. There are five stages in the design and development process. The first stage begins with user research. Accordingly, product functions and morphology are investigated. Text and visual user scenarios are created as well. In the second stage, user-product interactions are examined in order to explore the context of usage. In the third stage, ten sets of conceptual designs are built with the application of Arduino based interactive prototyping platform. In the fourth stage, these conceptual designs are evaluated by users and technical experts. In the last stage, the design concepts are further improved based on evaluation feedback, and are processed into engineering and technical prototypes. The challenge lies in the correlation between interaction design considerations and application of technologies. The findings of our study imply a principle to face this challenge: bringing users, context, morphology and technology together to design and develop interactive products. Interaction design methods provide our students guidance and inspirations to generate conceptual design ideas. Experimental prototyping practices facilitate our students' ability to turn ambiguous ideas into feasible design artifacts. We envisage further developing our experience by conducting similar interaction design research studies again in the future.