UbiKit: Learning to Prototype for Tangible and Ubiquitous Computing

As more and more ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) technologies pervade our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly important to train interaction design students to create these technologies. However, teaching students to design ubicomp technologies can be challenging, because creating a prototype, which people can use and students can learn from, usually requires a long setup and development phase. While there are some prototyping kits available, such as Arduino or the Raspberry Pi, they often require relatively steep learning curves before anything sophisticated can be prototyped. For this reason, we created UbiKit, a quick-to-setup, reusable, and affordable toolkit for the rapid design of ubicomp technologies that enable people to co-explore different scenarios and focus on the users. We piloted UbiKit in a Master-level course on ubicomp related topics and reflect on its potential to help streamline the prototyping and overall learning process for students being trained in our research area.