Prototyping Smart Objects for the Mass

Several do-it-yourself projects and toolkits aim to empower people in bringing intelligence into their personal environments. This is particularly challenging because there is still a large gap between people who can imagine how technology could simplify their life and engineers who can actually make things behave smart. To unite both camps, we present a platform that enables ordinary people to become the inventor of their own smart objects, assisted by a community of field experts. Our software, called D-TALE, fosters the creativity of people by giving them a forum where they can express and prototype their innovative ideas. Moreover, D-TALE gives rise to a crowd-sourcing platform where nontechnical users can request developers to provide an implementation for their project. We validated our approach by means of a real-world case study and a preliminary user experiment.