Components and Events Identification Challenges and Practices in Interactive Prototypes Construction: A Field Study in a Design Course

Prototyping technologies are crucial for sustaining an iterative prototype process that is efficient and adaptable. For designers, building, programming, and troubleshooting an interactive prototypes’ electronic connections, communications, and computing system’s components continues to be a challenging task. This fieldwork study explores, describes, and analyses the practices, tools, and technologies used by design students in the construction of interactive prototypes on a university course. The research investigation reviews the interactive prototypes and presents and analyses excerpts of interviews with students. Our findings shed light on the socio-technical factors that influence the choice of digital components. The study describes the types of digital connections and communications among prototype components and the practices adopted by design students to build them. Last, our results show that practices to identify components and users’ interactions were based on sophisticated time- or event-based strategies. Finally, the implications of the findings of the study are discussed.