Designing for the internet of things: Prototyping material interactions

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers fertile ground to consider the nature of electronic prototyping, especially in building systems from the lowest level. While constructing artifacts to interact directly with everyday materials and contexts, we've found it important to approach the IoT from the very lowest levels of hardware to avoid both abstracting away from real knowledge of the platform itself as well as to reduce implementation cost for massive deployment. Building new, inexpensive platforms that augment everyday objects in minimal ways is our proposal for an alternative to top-down control of IoT devices. We intend to move towards interactions among and between things as a bottom-up design study into ubiquitous small-scale computing and its potential aesthetic applications.