Sketching in software and hardware Bluetooth as a design material

In any design process, a medium’s properties need to be considered. This is generally well established, yet still within interactive systems design, the properties of a technological medium are often glossed over. That is, technologies are often black-boxed without much thought given to how their distinctive material properties open up the design space. In this paper, we experiment with a technology to see what might be gained from intentionally and systematically investigating its properties. Specifically, we look upon Bluetooth from the perspective of being a design material and examine how its properties from that perspective can be used to shape design thinking. Using four example cases or “sketches”, we show that Bluetooth’s properties, often seen as constraints, can provide useful building blocks for designing interactive systems.