Electronics prototyping boards such as Arduino, BBC micro:bit, and Raspberry Pi, work with a variety of software tools to enable a wide variety of creators with and without an engineering background — including students and researchers — to rapidly and inexpensively create interactive prototypes. By opening up the process of prototyping to more creators, and by making it cheaper and quicker, these prototyping platforms and toolkits have enabled research and explorations that weave computing into the fabric of the world around us.

Today, however, the most successful platforms follow a particular format: they are based on a rigid circuit board comprising a microcontroller and general-purpose expansion ports or pins. While these technologies support prototyping pretty effectively, we think there is still an opportunity for a more diverse set of technologies to further empower an even broader set of technology designers, engineers, makers, and researchers.

Results and resources

At the workshop we had 45 registered participants from 11 countries. The results of the workshop as well some pictures of the event can be found here. We also maintain an open Discord server that you can join for updates about future events.

About the Workshop

With this workshop, we aim to understand how recent software and hardware trends, from metamaterials to neurally-inspired processors, from printed electronics to reprogrammable digital and analog arrays (FPGAs & FPAAs), and from MicroPython to live-programming might be leveraged in future prototyping software platforms and hardware toolkits, beyond the well-established paradigm of mainstream microcontroller boards. What is the future of electronics prototyping toolkits? How will the requirements and applications of new prototyping toolkits evolve? How will these tools fit in the current ecosystem, and how will they be learned? What are the new opportunities for research and commercialization?

This workshop will bring together those working in academia, industry, and beyond, with experience or interest in physical computing, electronic hardware design, software platforms for device prototyping, and digital fabrication of electronics for interactive artifacts. The workshop organizers will foster discussion, facilitate synthesis work, help the exchange of ideas to move the field forward, and build a community at CHI around electronic prototyping tools and toolkits. For more details about the workshop please see the accepted workshop proposal document.

How to Participate?

If you are interested in participation, please submit a two to four-page position paper using the following Word template: docx. Your position paper should describe a novel software or hardware platform, toolkit, or technique to support or improve the process of electronic prototyping. We also welcome submissions that are more abstract but try to either describe the limits of the current approaches or build on them with new ideas and suggestions. The paper should also briefly introduce yourself or your team and we encourage you to outline a vision for future ways of prototyping. These papers will form the basis of the group discussions at the workshop. Accepted papers will be published under Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International) and posted on this website for public reference.

Upon acceptance of the submission you will be required to prepare a 1-minute introductory video of yourself and your work that will be shared online with the rest of the participants before the workshop. At least one participant among the authors of a submission must physically attend the workshop.

Practical Information

Schedule

The workshop will be hosted at CHI2023 (https://chi2023.acm.org) and consists of a 1-day in-person event. We expect roughly 45 participants. We plan a series of activities to learn about each other's work and interests, present personal perspectives, work in small teams, and participate in moderated discussions. We encourage participants to bring prototypes and show videos of their work to ground the interactive discussions.