The progress of any creative discipline changes significantly with the quality of the tools available. As the diversity of user interfaces multiplies in the shift away from personal desktop computing, yesterday's tools and concepts are insufficient to serve the designers of tomorrow's interfaces. My research in human-computer interaction focuses on the earliest stages in UI creation - activities that take a novel idea and transform it into a concrete, interactive artifact that can be experienced, tested, and compared against other ideas. In this talk I will give an overview of different prototyping tools I have built with collaborators to address two research questions: How can tools enable a wider range of designers to create functional prototypes of ubiquitous computing interfaces? And how can design tools support the larger process of learning from these prototypes?

Björn Hartmann is a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of Ambidextrous magazine, Stanford's Journal of Design. His research focuses on design prototyping and physical computing tools. His prototyping tools have been used at companies such as Nokia, Leapfrog, IDEO, and Frog. He received degrees in Communication, Digital Media Design, and Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. He is a recipient of the UIST 2006 and CHI 2007 Best Paper Awards. Before moving to the Bay Area, Björn had a successful career as an electronic musician and record label owner.