Sketching interactive experiences: Video scenarios to support imagination and co-design

The paper presents the use of video-scenarios to support co-design of smart systems for public spaces. Video-scenarios are commonly employed in the design of innovative services and systems to visualize the main features of the designed solutions; we explored, instead, an early use of videos as a tool to support imagination, to favour the cooperation between the members of the project team from the real beginning of the project process, and to orient the project efforts toward an optimal solution in terms of human satisfaction. We created videos in order to sketch the main emotional and cognitive factors conditioning the user experience, before the actual functionalities were defined and described. The videos, ambiguous from the technology and functional points of view indicate the emotional factors of the users experience, enable co-design between engineers and designers for further research activities and elicit creative inspiration. The paper presents main the phases of the design process and some results achieved.