Prototyping Ubiquitous Biosensing Applications through Speculative Design

Biosensing technologies, under development since the 1960s, are now moving into the mainstream IT domain. It is only a matter of time before biosensors become as ubiquitous as mobile phones. While biosensing is inherently a technical domain, the acceptance of biosensing technologies into everyday life will more likely be determined by social and cultural factors. In order to imagine how such acceptance (or the opposite thereof) might occur, we have designed an online resource on biosensing and related topics. We then asked students of media design and architecture to speculate on future biosensing scenarios with the help of this resource. This experiment was performed at three universities, one in the United States, one in Canada and one in Indonesia. This paper describes results from this experiment and considers implications for the design procedures of ubiquitous sensor systems in general.