(by Sascha)

FTD today points towards the Stanford HCI Group who have developed a toolkit for designers of digital devices. D.tools enables product designers to try out the desired functionality themselves before handing it over to the engineers to have them cast all the nifty miniaturization-magic on the item. This they hope, will lead to products that are less flawed in terms of interface design since it’s obviously very tedious and expensive to alter the position of a certain button when all the electronics have already been finalized.

And – non miniaturized working stuff leads to very lovely oversized models of well-known gadgets. Figures above are cardboard mock-ups of digital camera and an iPod Shuffle!