THF: Week 9: Prototyping
The pre-lecture content for week 9 will build upon what you learned in week 8 to prepare you to start creating your prototypes next week.
For coursework 2, you will need to create sketches for 3 of your design ideas and describe them in a paragraph. The sketches could be one design idea in more detail or could be a combination of two or more design ideas that work together. In order to narrow down your 10 design ideas to 3 sketches, you can apply the below criteria for selecting ideas. Ask each of the following questions for each of your ideas:
- Experience: how does it enhance the experience of your participants?
- Insight: what will you learn from its deployment?
- Innovation: is the design novel?
- Feasibility: can you build a prototype to test it?
A reminder that sketching is not about drawing, it is about design. It is a tool to help you express, develop, and communicate design ideas. Sketching is part of a process of idea generation, and design collaboration and communication. The attributes of a sketch are that it is quick to make, provided when needed, and disposable. Sketching is more about the process and concept, not the execution. If you can’t afford to throw it away, it’s not a sketch!
Your sketches should communicate your design idea but does not need to communicate a final design. The paragraph should describe your design idea and how it solves the design problem in more detail, how the user interacts with it, and any key features that support human factors.
Throughout the process, continue to review your ideas and sketches. Do they address the problem you have identified from your CW1 reports? Or do you need to brainstorm and sketch additional ideas? The exact number of ideas and sketches will depend on the nature of the idea, i.e., if it is a unique idea or a minor variation of an existing design. Aim for breadth of ideas, and several iterations from design ideas to sketches to prototype.
Work through the following sections of the Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook book by Saul Greenberg et al.:
Section 3.4: The Vanilla Sketch
Section 3.5: The Collaborative Sketch
In the week 9 lecture, we will go through the different kinds of prototyping you can use for CW2. Come prepared with your sketches in order to consider how your idea/s might be prototyped in a way that a potential user could interact with it or in a way that it could be demonstrated to a potential user.