Remember the Physical Environment
Designing for the Internet of Things
This is the fourth article in a series of six on designing connected devices, the previous article in the series is “Your Developers’ User Experience,” and talks about product design. The next is “Time to Market vs Common Sense,” and talks about manufacturing as a startup. Links to all six articles can be found in the series overview.
At the prototyping stage the physical environment for your device operates in is fairly benign, an air conditioned office or a lab perhaps, however once out in the world your final product may face an unforgiving natural environment — wind, rain, snow, and worst of all users.
Physical Environment
When designing the prototype its important to consider where it will eventually be installed. Will it be inside, or outside. If inside what sort of inside environment will it face. While an office environment may be temperature regulated, a factory floor while theoretically also being an inside environment may suffer extremes of heat or cold. If installed outside there will be a large variation in temperature over the course of a year, or even over the course of each day. The device needed not only to be able to cope with the expected maximum and minimum temperature extremes, but also possible rapid variations between those extremes.
