IoTSim: Designing Interactive Products with Synthetic Data: An exploration into data-driven design with comprehensive tool support

Designing interactive products means creating complex mappings between inputs and outcomes, that is, between sensor data and external information and actuations in a context. Data is an essential “material” of design in this approach, which increasingly consists of real-time data streams. The more complex the data streams become, the more difficult it becomes to apply traditional design methods without dedicated support for (1) sketching and scaffolding “online” data, (2) scheduling and simulating data, and (3) recording and replaying data as needed. We need active environments that prototypes can be immersed in, such that they receive such data and can respond to them according to their intended and designed behavior.