Ideating in Skills: Developing Tools for Embodied Co-Design

The authors have requested minor, non-substantive changes to the VoR and, in accordance with ACM policies, a Corrected VoR was published on September 30, 2020. For reference purposes the VoR may still be accessed via the Supplemental Material section on this page.

In this paper, we show the development of the Ideating in Skills (IiS) toolset: an embodied design tool aimed at supporting co-design processes. The iterative process of developing the toolset was carried out by students. They worked individually at first, exploring their own skills and moods through movement, visualisations and poetry. These explorations were translated into objects that were able to communicate and connect with each other. In each iteration, the design of the qualities of these connections was based on the findings of the previous explorations. After several individual and team-based iterations, a final toolset was collaboratively created and evaluated in various short design sessions. Based on the potential of the first version of the toolset, a second version was created that is currently used and tested in one-on-one settings all over the world and in multi-stakeholder settings in a creative hub in Sweden.