Designing innovative digital platforms from both human and nonhuman perspectives

Digital platforms are becoming critical infrastructures for supporting a variety of innovative services that enhance our everyday lives. These platforms need to offer not only rational services but also ludic or slow services that focus on human pleasure. One important aspect of creating innovative digital platforms is that their concrete requirements and potential opportunities are vague before they are designed. Thus, designing, prototyping and evaluating digital platforms iteratively is essential for refining or customizing them, as knowledge is gradually gained throughout these iterations. However, it is costly to develop prototype platforms and evaluate them with traditional methods. A better tool that can be used to reveal these platforms’ potential opportunities by conceiving them in a simple and rapid way is needed. In this paper, we present our journey to develop nine digital platforms that share collective human sight and hearing with the Human-Material-Pleasure (HMP) annotation method, which is a tool that we use to describe the visually structured annotations of multiple digital platforms based on the annotated portfolio method. The most significant part of the paper presents annotated portfolios based on the HMP annotation method for the nine digital platforms that we develop and shows how these annotated portfolios play an essential role in revealing and exploring the potential opportunities of our platforms during the refinement process. We also discuss how the HMP annotation method is used in the context of exploring the potential opportunities of wearable shape-changing robotic devices; these devices have significantly different characteristics from our digital platforms, which allows for showing insights more objectively by extracting diverse insights from an alternative angle.