Making Hardware Devices at Scale is Still Hard: Challenges and Opportunities for the HCI Community

Embedded systems and interactive devices form an essential interface between the physical and digital world and are understandably an important focus for the HCI research community. However, scaling an interactive prototype of a new device concept to enable effective evaluation or to support the transition to a production-ready device is incredibly challenging. To better understand the issues innovators face when scaling up interactive device prototypes we report the results from 22 interviews with practitioners in the interactive device field, including eight academics involved in the HCI and manufacturing research communities. In our two-phase analysis we identify and validate the following four recurring themes. First and foremost is the observation that “creating relationships with industry” is hard. Second, “effective communication requires a lot of effort” despite the availability of modern collaboration tools. Thirdly, we observed that “understanding the manufacturer’s perspective” can be difficult. Finally, “prototyping is nothing like production”—the vast difference between these two activities still surprises many. Additionally, our university-based participants gave us further insights and helped us to identify challenges specific to the academic context, pointing to a number of opportunities relating to hardware device scaling.