On the afternoon of May 11, 2015, College of Design and Innovation (D&I) of Tongji University and Taihuoniao, an incubation platform of intelligent hardware, jointly held a round-table discussion on the development of intelligent hardware. LIU Wei, director of D&I User Experience Design Research Lab, CUI Bo and FAN Yabin, co-founders of Taihuoniao, discussed and shared their views with D&I industrial design majors in the lecture hall.

Based on their previous investigation on domains of intelligent hardware, and taking the rigid demand of the market and the overall development of intelligent hardware into consideration, the guests gave many insightful opinions and analyses. They believed that, intelligent hardware is currently at a stage of drastic development, which calls for novel creativity and unique designs to ensure the market could enjoy a virtuous cycle of development. However, at the present stage the market is inevitably subject to a certain disorder. Therefore, neither should we blindly apply intelligent hardware product innovation to the market, nor should we uncritically cater to the market by compromising the essence of design. Instead, we should develop and apply intelligent hardware based on the conditions of the market and user needs.

Students were fascinated by new trend of cutting-edge technology, and many of them put forward their design ideas, to which the guests responded with detailed comments and analyses. The last session of this activity was a presentation of intelligent hardware products, wherein students managed to experience various intelligent products, including Misfit Shine, Gopro camera, Quirky Pivot Power Genius and DJI Phantom.

Shi Wan Huo Ji Campus Activity initiated by Taihuoniao aims at providing an opportunity for students to communicate with innovation masters face to face to get valuable instructions and suggestions from them. As one of the leading design schools in China, D&I, featuring innovation design (Design 3.0), devotes itself to developing intelligent sustainable design geared to industry transformation and future life. D&I has been emphasizing the combination of theoretical education and design practices, and has made it possible for creative ideas, design sketches and product prototypes to enter into incubation process.