BEST Labbers win “Reviewers’ Favourite Award” at the 2013 International Conference on Engineering Design. The award is in recognition of a paper that was uniformly rated excellent (top 10%) by all reviewers. Euiyoung Kim was the lead author (with Prof. Alice Agogino and undergraduate researchers Victoria Stanton Kocsik and Cecile Eren Basnage) on the paper titled: Human-Centric Study of Digital-Paper Transitions: Framing Design Opportunity Spaces. The paper reported on human-centered design research with our Samsung Next Digital project.

Abstract: Although digital devices have their own unique features that differentiate them from other tangible types of resources for reading, writing and sketching, a majority of people still prefer traditional paper media as it provides better user experiences in many aspects: readability, portability, ease of making annotations, shared reading, tactile sensory experiences, etc. This paper identifies barriers and opportunities for paper-related features based on human-centric design research directed towards the overarching goal of providing insights for finding disruptive opportunity spaces. In framing our design research, we define journeys that tangible and digital media follow – from original form, transitions and final form. Our target populations are college students and professionals in diverse majors and work environments. Based on insights from our design research, we present personas and case studies.