What kind of tools would you need to make a functional interactive prototype of a media player in 30 minutes?

d.tools is a hardware and software system that enables designers to rapidly prototype the bits (the form) and the atoms (the interaction model) of physical user interfaces in concert. d.tools was built to support design thinking rather than implementation tinkering. With d.tools, designers place physical controllers (e.g., buttons, sliders), sensors (e.g., accelerometers), and output devices (e.g., LEDs, LCD screens) directly onto form prototypes, and author their behavior visually in our software workbench.

The d.tools architecure was inspired by fieldwork conducted at Bay Area design studios and Stanford's graduate product design program. After building an initial prototype with Flash and Phidgets, d.tools has now turned into a full-fledged plug-in for Eclipse with its own dedicated hardware platform. D.tools has been used to re-create existing devices, is currently being deployed at a professional product design consultancy, and will be given to students in Stanford's HCI Design Studio course this winter.

Demonstration of design-test-analyze support in d.tools, April 2006
H.264 Quicktime version (MOV, 1280x720, 4:30, 40MB).

Demonstration of the d.tools Eclipse plug-in and hardware platform, September 2005
long version (04:30) WMV, short version (02:30) WMV

UIST 2006 Talk, October 2006 (20 minutes, different formats available)

Financial Times Deutschland (2/24/06)
Qualität durch Basteln (in German)
Quality by Tinkering (in Google English)

Stanford Report (2/21/06)
Good computer interfaces respect the real world, Klemmer says

Make magazine blog (1/31/06)
Functional prototypes in 30 minutes or less...

d.tools was shown at the MAKER Faire, April 22-23, 2006 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds in San Mateo, California. You can catch a brief glimpse of our stand in this Revision 3 Systm Internet TV show (thanks to Martin Davidsson for the link)

Hartmann, B., Klemmer, S.R., Bernstein, M., Abdulla, L., Burr, B., Robinson-Mosher, A., Gee, J.
Reflective physical prototyping through integrated design, test, and analysis.
Proceedings of UIST 2006, October 2006 - Best paper award!

Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama
How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design.
Proceedings of DIS2006, June 2006.

Hartmann, B., Klemmer, S.R., and Bernstein, M.
d.tools: Integrated Prototyping for Physical Interaction Design.
Work-in-Progress report in IEEE Pervasive Computing, Oct-Dec 2005. 1 page.

Hartmann, B., Klemmer, S. R., Bernstein, M., and Mehta, N.
d.tools: Visually Prototyping Physical UIs through Statecharts.
In Extended Abstracts of UIST 2005, October 23-26, 2005, Seattle, WA. 2 pages.

Talk slides (ppt), presented on October 18, 2006, at UIST in Montreux.

Installation instructions for the d.tools Visual Authoring Environment
User guide for the d.tools Visual Authoring Environment
Developer guide (javadoc)
d.tools lite (Java API for working with d.tools hardware without the visual editor)
Hardware resources (updated 2006-05-26)

Exemplar is a tool that introduces new techniques for authoring sensor based interactions through programming by demonstration.