Eccentric Sensing Devices: Using Conceptual Design Notes to Understand Design Opportunities, Limitations, and Concerns Connected to Digital Sensing

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More things are becoming equipped with digital sensors, central processors, and network connections. Alongside marketing and engineering terminology such as Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing, designers and HCI researchers need new concepts to help understand the design opportunities, limitations, and social concerns connected to digital sensing systems. This pictorial presents an array of conceptual design notes clustered around 5 themes: sensor overreach, layered sensing, floating sensors, unpredictable sensing, and sensor attenuation. We present these thematic notes, discuss their uses, and outline our approach to creatively generating them using eccentric sensing devices. Too often the “intermediate” design research outcomes contained within notebooks, workbooks, and studios are abandoned or discarded in favor of a “final” refined and singular object. Here we amplify and elevate intermediate design proposals, scenarios, and experiments into a refined compositional whole. As a whole, this pictorial exemplifies the value of intimate and nuanced depictions of creative processes—details too often omitted from final publications and finished products.