I-Corps: Storycoding I-Corps Team

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

A successful product requires synthesizing explicit and tacit knowledge from domain experts to create a solution that is easily produced, meets customer needs, and is financially viable in the marketplace. Ambiguity in product specifications and miscommunications among stakeholders during the early design phases create downstream changes that incur significant financial and engineering costs to re-work. Achieving a common vision across disciplines and employing agile development and prototyping is essential to ensuring delivery of a timely and cost-effective product. Software-based solutions for product design collaboration and prototyping have been explored for traditional product design processes; however the unique characteristics of emerging wearable, pervasive, and internet-of-things products require new solutions. These products tightly couple physical and computation elements to create novel human-computer interactions that constantly sense and adapt to user needs. To create these systems, design teams must simultaneously balance the computational and physical constraints of the design, and understand how users will interact with the product over its life time. The proposed tool, called ?Storycoding? addresses these challenges by providing design teams an accessible sketch-based interface to collaborate and express product ideas for novel pervasive computing products. Storycoding actively interprets a design team's storyboards to ensure relevant computational and user interaction requirements have been specified. Storycoding can automatically generate source code for a product, allowing more rapid prototype generation during the ideation and design phases of product development.