Adapting Paper Prototyping Techniques for Interactive Workspaces

Low-fidelity paper prototyping is a well-known and effective technique for expressing, communicating, and evaluating design ideas for interactive systems [8]. This technique enables and encourages rapid iteration on a design, which can lead to significant usability improvements with minimal investment of time and resources. In our work, we have sought to bring the benefits of paper prototyping to the design of user interfaces for interactive workspaces. The term interactive workspace refers to a pervasive computing environment in which multiple independent devices are networked through a distributed infrastructure. An interactive workspace can be formed by instrumenting a fixed physical workspace (e.g., [4, 9]) or by networking an ad-hoc collection of devices (e.g., [6]).