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Greenberg, S. and Marquardt, N. (2008)
Sketching Digitally Controlled Physical Products with Shared Phidgets. in Physicality & Design Workshop, held at the ACM DIS Conference, February 25–27, 2008, Cape Town, South Africa.
Type: Refereed workshop. Note: Uncertainty exists about these publication details.

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Abstract.
Within design, a sketch serves to develop and illustrate the essence of an idea. For digitally controlled physical products, we argue that designers can augment paper-based sketches with interactive working models as long they are quick to make. Using working models as sketches are beneficial, as they can help the designer reflect upon various characteristics of an idea: interaction flow over time, object animation, form factors, contextual locations, and so on. In this paper, we show by example how Phidgets hardware and the Shared Phidgets software toolkit can be used as a medium for sketching networks of digitally controlled physical products. When such systems are realized as interactive sketches, they serve as a vehicle that helps a designer make vague ideas concrete, reflect on possible problems and uses, discover alternate new ideas and refine current ones.