Design Education Exploring IoT in Sports with an Ethnographic Toolkit

Design emphasizes the understanding of user needs through direct interaction to build empathy before developing solutions. This approach is crucial for emerging technologies like IoT, which lack defined roles in daily life. Modern design education incorporates ethnography to enable students to engage with approachable communities, facilitating effective user research within academic project timelines. This contribution presents a didactic approach that intertwines human-centered research skills with technological prototyping. The focus is on sporting communities in public spaces, explored with a purpose-built ethnographic toolkit designed to uncover user insights and develop IoT solutions that enhance community activities. The article describes the preparation and implementation of a course on interactive urban sports, which included mapping 65 sports communities to select 8 for collaboration, designing a specialized ethnographic toolkit, and conducting two targeted literature reviews—on IoT applications in sports and on the role of sports in fostering social connectedness. Throughout the course, 10 student teams engaged in field research and developed IoT-based prototypes tailored to the communities' needs. The toolkit’s effectiveness in supporting user research was then evaluated through interviews, questionnaires, and the System Usability Scale, identifying both its strengths and areas for refinement. By exploring the value of design toolkits and the potential of IoT to strengthen social bonds within communities, the study demonstrates how interdisciplinary design education can prepare students to respond creatively and responsibly to real-world challenges at the intersection of technology, society, and public space.