Beyond prototyping boards: future paradigms for electronics toolkits

Abstract

Electronics prototyping platforms such as Arduino enable a wide variety of creators with and without an engineering background to rapidly and inexpensively create interactive prototypes. By opening up the process of prototyping to more creators, and by making it cheaper and quicker, prototyping platforms and toolkits have undoubtedly shaped the HCI community. With this workshop, we aim to understand how recent trends in technology, from reprogrammable digital and analog arrays to printed electronics, and from metamaterials to neurally-inspired processors, might be leveraged in future prototyping platforms and toolkits. Our goal is to go beyond the well-established paradigm of mainstream microcontroller boards, leveraging the more diverse set of technologies that already exist but to date have remained relatively niche. What is the future of electronics prototyping toolkits? How will these tools fit in the current ecosystem? What are the new opportunities for research and commercialization?