HP’s popular Sprocket mini-printer is most commonly used as either a standalone device at home, or to bring instant printing to mobile social occasions like birthday parties and cookouts with friends. But what if you had more than one Sprocket at your disposal and you wanted to see what their presence might add in a professional setting?
That opportunity recently arose for two researchers from HP’s Immersive Experiences Lab, Tico Ballagas and Sarthak Ghosh, when they were invited to participate in a day-long experimental workshop that saw a group of design professionals pushing the boundaries of creativity through a technique the organizers describe as “Disruptive Improvisation.”
“We're always interested in looking at how technology can improve the design process, particularly when you remember that design is evolving as technologies themselves change,” Ballagas says. “This was a great chance to explore what role the HP Sprocket can play in that evolution.”
The workshop took place at the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the leading global conference of Human-Computer Interaction, held this year in Montreal, Canada. Among the organizers were industrial designers Laura Devendorf of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Daniela Rosner of the University of Washington, with whom Ballagas had worked and who invited HP’s participation.
All the workshop participants were asked to arrive with ideas for techniques or strategies – called “tactics” – that would disrupt their normal design process. These could introduce randomness, for example, or role play, or radically restrict the materials from which they were allowed to create a design.
