thingM’s Technology Sketches
by Amanda WilloughbyCheck out this video technology sketch of a smart wine rack. thingM says these sketches are part of a product development process that “focus on users’ experiences first and technological details later”. They also mention that a final product might not end up looking anything like the sketch because the point of making it is to develop the conceptual model of the experience.
Looks like a really effective way of both communicating and thinking through a product concept — especially for a product where understanding interactions within a physical context is important.
This entry was posted
on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Product Design.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This post is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
January 15th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Interesting. I’m also intrigued by the choice of the wine rack. On that page, they list many reasons for wine rack, but neither of them are the two that I immediately thought of:
1) the wine bottle was essentially the mascot of Bruce Sterling’s _Shaping Things_, the book that explicated the concept of spime, and was much about the ubicomp movement that ThingM is deeply part of
2) wine is the canonical subject to explain faceted classification systems, and I found it interesting that the problem they sketch here is largely one of (the much maligned) information architecture.
January 16th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Thanks for the note. The evolution of the wine rack was as follows: first, we were working on an RFID bookshelf and realizing that there were a lot of location and display challenges and that we’d like to first work in a more limited environment; my friend Eric then suggested wine, which made a lot of sense because of the physical properties of bottles (which, incidentally, are many of the same properties that made wine.com the first sizable ecommerce site). Wine racks came as a natural extension, since bottle tracking is interesting from a logistics standpoint, but the organization and management of wine is more relevant to people’s everyday experiences. Shaping Things may have been a subconscious reference–I respect Sterling’s book, but wasn’t actively thinking about it–but the relationship to facet browsing was intentional. Wine is a faceted information system projected onto a standardized container (and, well, some liquid
). Other things share many these qualities–Persian Rugs for example–but wine has an additional quality that makes it interesting: it gets drunk. The regular turnover makes for a good dynamic design exercise.
January 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Very nice. It always amazes me how new technologies can be used in different ways.