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Lesson 3

Topic

Prototyping concepts, prototyping everything

Reading Material

Moriwaki, K. & Brucker-Cohen, J. 2006. “Lessons from the scrapyard: creative uses of found materials within a workshop setting”. In AI & Society. 20:4. 506-525.

moriwaki_brucker-cohen.pdf

1) What are the new terms in this text? How are they defined? Where do they come from?

  • "third place": some place outside of work or home, in which creative experimentation and playful engagement occurs.

1) Who are the authors? Where do they work? Who do they refer to?

  • written in 2005, published in 2006, Brucker-Cohen: PHD, researcher, artist, writer, worked in Trinity College in dublin. Moriwaki: Associate Professor of Media Design at Parsons School of Design.

1) What questions come to your mind from reading this text?

  • how can the "time pressure" aspect that often leads to creative problem solving be changed to make it less stressful?

4) How does it affect your design practice? What applications do you see in your practice?

  • working with discarded materials has many benefits, including cost, reduced waste, and is more sustainable.
  • working within a limited timeframe pushes designers to iterate quickly and helps to not overthink things.
  • Working with "things you find" leads to thinking outside the box, instead of with the fixed ideas in your head.
Schleicher D. & al. 2010. "Bodystorming as Embodied Designing". In Interactions.

schleicher_jones_kachur.pdf

1) What are the new terms in this text? How are they defined? Where do they come from?

  • embodied storming: not for ideation, but for creating the experience of physical performance to enact experiential awareness, performing actions in simulated settings and ocasions in real time.
  • fixation bias: idea/perspective captures attention and hinders search for original alternatives.
  • strong prototyping: recreating/simulating the actual use environment.
  • use-case theater: using actors and props to prototype the space and place of the products use.

2) Who are the authors? Where do they work? Who do they refer to?

  • published in 2010

3) What questions come to your mind from reading this text?

4) How does it affect your design practice? What applications do you see in your practice?

  • body storming or embodied design can help adress the weakness of groupthink/fixation/distance from a design.
  • in this context, its more helpful to think about "scenarios" rather than "ideas", because they often create sequences, themes, and conceptual continuity.
  • body storming should be one of the first steps taken, even pre-ideation. "We act it out to prevent us from overthinking it".
Houde, S., & Hill, C. 1997. "What Do Prototypes Prototype?", in M. Helander, T. Landauer, and P. Prabhu (eds.): Elsevier Science B. V: Amsterdam. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction.

houde_hill.pdf

1) What are the new terms in this text? How are they defined? Where do they come from?

  • resolution: "amount of detail
  • fidelity: "closeness to the eventual design"
  • role prototype: investigates what the artifact could do for a user
  • look and feel prototype: demonstrates options for the concrete experience of an artifact
  • implementation prototypes: answer technical questions about how it might work
  • integration prototype: represent complete user experience of an artifact

2) Who are the authors? Where do they work? Who do they refer to?

  • was published in 1997.

3) What questions come to your mind from reading this text?

  • is there a list of good examples of prototypes for specific questions, like ui, code, etc

4) How does it affect your design practice? What applications do you see in your practice?

  • think about prototypes in terms of artifacts being designed, not in terms of the prototypes attibutes --> what does it prototype, not how is it prototyped.
  • the details of the prototype changes with the features it needs to convey (look & feel, role, etc).
  • its not significant how or with which methods/tools prototypes were created, but how they are used by a designer to explore/demonstrate some aspect.
  • making seperate prototypes for seperate design questions is helpful.

Brief Summary of Lesson

This lesson was hosted by Timon and me, and we had our presentation about the different prototype methods and different kinds of prototypes. The presentation went mostly fine, but we got the feedback from Joëlle that she would have appreciated more editorial work, meaning that it would have been nice if we added more of our own takes and thoughts to the topic. Additionally, Joëlle mentioned that I was more quiet during the exercise part, and that i should have included myself more, which i agree with but i am still rather happy with how the presentation overall went.

Takeaways

The main takeaway for me was that i should include myself more in conversations even when another person is seeminlgly saying all of the things that i would have said, and of course i know have a much deeper and also broader knowlege about prototypes than i had before, which definitely will come in handy with all of my future projects.