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The calder toolkit: wired and wireless components for rapidly prototyping interactive devices

Published: 01 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Toolkits and other tools have dramatically reduced the time and technical expertise needed to design and implement graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allowing high-quality, iterative, user-centered design to become a common practice. Unfortunately the generation of functioning prototypes for physical interactive devices as not had similar support -- it still requires substantial time and effort by individuals with highly specialized skills and tools. This creates a divide between a designers' ability to explore form and interactivity of product designs and the ability to iterate on the basis of high fidelity interactive experiences with a functioning prototype. To help overcome this difficulty we have developed the Calder hardware toolkit. Calder is a development environment for rapidly exploring and prototyping functional physical interactive devices. Calder provides a set of reusable small input and output components, and integration into existing interface prototyping environments. These components communicate with a computer using wired and wireless connections. Calder is a tool targeted toward product and interaction designers to aid them in their early design process. In this paper we describe the process of gaining an understanding of the needs and workflow habits of our target users to generate a collection of requirements for such a toolkit. We describe technical challenges imposed by these needs, and the specifics of design and implementation of the toolkit to meet these challenges.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DIS '04: Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques
August 2004
390 pages
ISBN:1581137877
DOI:10.1145/1013115
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 August 2004

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Author Tags

  1. interaction and product design
  2. physical user interfaces
  3. rapid prototyping
  4. toolkits

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DIS04
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DIS04: Designing Interactive Systems 2004
August 1 - 4, 2004
MA, Cambridge, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Hardware is Hard—is it Worth it?Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3583751(1-4)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Plug-and-play Physical Computing with JacdacProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35503176:3(1-30)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
  • (2021)A Survey and Taxonomy of Electronics Toolkits for Interactive and Ubiquitous Device PrototypingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/34635235:2(1-24)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2021
  • (2021)ActuBoard: An Open Rapid Prototyping Platform to integrate Hardware Actuators in Remote ApplicationsCompanion of the 2021 ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems10.1145/3459926.3464757(70-76)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2021
  • (2021)EMBody: A Data-Centric Toolkit for EMG-Based Interface Prototyping and ExperimentationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34571425:EICS(1-29)Online publication date: 29-May-2021
  • (2021)A Case Study of Usability in Virtual ControlsDesign, User Experience, and Usability: Design for Contemporary Technological Environments10.1007/978-3-030-78227-6_36(503-523)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Democratizing the Production of Interactive HardwareProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3379337.3422877(5-6)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2020
  • (2020)The Wearables Development ToolkitProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/33698133:4(1-26)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2020
  • (2020)PneuModule: Using Inflatable Pin Arrays for Reconfigurable Physical Controls on Pressure-Sensitive Touch SurfacesProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376838(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2020)Beyond the Prototype: Understanding the Challenge of Scaling Hardware Device ProductionProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376761(1-11)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
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