prototypingforcrumbs

[prototypingforcrumbs]

Buchenau and Suri - Experience Prototyping

The larger point of the text is to spread the "good word" of Experience Prototyping as a concept and why it can be so useful. I, for one, am sold. I found it to be quite interesting over all.

In the text, they bring up a large number of examples of types of experience prototyping, with different situations and goals. There is one where they talk about a prototype for a very early digital camera and the prototyping made around that. In this example, it became abundantly clear how effective this can be even when dealing with end users. What is left on my mind, however, is that they did not seem to derive too many things from existing cameras of the time. It could be interesting to get more insight into the design process to see what motivated this decision, since presumably, even earlier cameras would be designed in a certain way for good reasons. It's possible that they decided for more of a "clean slate" since digital cameras might have different essential aspects to them than analogue ones.

Another thing that was on my mind a lot when reading through the examples was how clear it can be that experiencing something first-hand is useful, it can be difficult to see why it is useful until you've experienced the concept in question yourself. The layers of how it is useful is not immediately apparent at all times, and I think that's very interesting. I would argue that experience prototyping in a way is a way to open your mind to new perspectives, which in my personal experience is absolutely essential to meaningful learning about the world, but this time in the context of a designer.

[prototypingforcrumbs]

API Lab Entry 2 (11/2)

During the week, we learned how to work with our Arduinos as an API and learned even more about the vast uses of libraries and APIs. We ended up creating a color picker with a wheel, that could be controlled with a joystick and sent the picked color to an RGB LED.

This was a very fun exercise, and there was a lot to learn about it. Not only did we end up expanding on the knowledge from the previous week a LOT for all three fields (Arduino, libraries and API) and got to put it into use, we also got a lot more opportunity to see how it can be used for interaction designers.

The first day, we mostly brainstormed and looked at libraries and APIs, and picked our lovely Color Picker API from iro.js. On the second day we spent the most time of the project, and made almost the entirety of our prototype. The third one we mostly polished it, debugged a bit and added some flash.

The biggest difficulties we faced stemmed from two places. First, from understanding what parts of the code runs when. Second, from converting a value from a 2-dimensional coordinate (the joystick) to a color with three values. We considered instead controlling the hue and saturation with the 2 values from the joystick instead at one point, but ended up finding a way to (to a certain extent, at least) make our initial idea work. The hue/saturation solution would also have been a lot less flashy since left and right on the joystick would have been controlling the hue, limiting it to either slowly scrolling through options, or precisely moving through them as it moved, both seeming quite clunky in their own way.

During the demonstration where people were showing what they had made, I couldn't stop thinking that a lot of it had a lot to do with how things could possibly "feel" if it had been implemented in different ways. There were definitely a lot of restraints here both in terms of time, knowledge and hardware, but I like to think we made something kind of cool in the short time we had.

For instance, ours would have potentially felt a lot better with some more debugging, and we were also limited by the relatively low-quality joysticks in our Arduino kits. There ended up being clear "steps" between colors because of the "steps" between max and mid-points with the joysticks. This definitely limited the ease in picking a specific color, if you wanted something not fully saturated, for instance. It was much easier to hold the joystick at it's maximum in any of the directions than to hover it halfway.

Some things worked better than others however, with the color on the screen and lamp updating immediately with the movement of the joystick, giving a feeling of connectedness to the finished prototype that we were quite happy with.

In the end, I think prototypes like this can be useful for an interaction designer in different cases. Depending on who you are trying to showcase something for, it seems like a fairly simple but powerful way of conveying an idea. Even if it is not quite representative of what the finished product might look like, it certainly made you think about what is possible, what needed to be considered when building it, and opened your eyes to new things in regards to this. It's probably a lot more useful for prototyping for the teams themselves and teams that might work in close proximity, but probably not so much for potential customers (given that it's a very rough prototype, mostly.)

[prototypingforcrumbs]

API Labs (1-3 Feb) entry 1:

The last few days we have started learning about using libraries, JSON and APIs. First we learned to use a library to create a simple chart, afterwards we fetched some information from a local JSON-file, and then combined these into making a chart from information contained in a local JSON-file. Later, we learned to access APIs and how to pass information and receive information using JSON in this, and how it can be used.

These days have been a bit of a rollercoaster in that they are short days in terms of listening to a lecture, but packed in terms of learning new concepts. I'm finding a lot of it to be graspable, but I definitely need to pay close attention and often listen to the instructions more than once to understand the concepts in full.

It's definitely clear how widely useful all of these concepts can prove in the future. From what I understand, JSON is used to an incredibly large extent (along with APIs), and libraries stand on their own in how useful they are. Some of the people in the class already seem to have experience with libraries, and seem to have used them almost in place of their original programming languages, since they allow you to use functions and code that has already been written by others for your own needs. As people have stated when talking to them about code in this manner, "Why reinvent the wheel?" or; "Why write code ourselves that is already there to use?".

I'm curious if we'll have the chance to use these tools/skills in this course, however. Creating a prototype using them seems difficult, but perhaps that kind of prototype would also be very useful? It can depend on what we need to find out, of course.

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Makey Makey board workshop 31/1 Today we had a workshop where we got to create our own game controllers using Makey Makey boards, wires and simple materials. Our group created a controller for a simple fighting game where you could move in the game using your actual feet and "punch" in the game using your hands to punch a box, to give it more of a feel of that you're using your own body to control the game. This was definitely very fun, and although it felt a bit difficult to see what I might get out of it at the start, I learned to think differently about ways to creates simple prototypes of something, either "real" prototypes or the kind you can use to "fake" for a prototype video. There seems to be many possible layers of this, even for this simple and quick of an exercise. You could augment things like we did to mimic the game in real life, other groups had similar takes as well, but the most impressive ones were probably the ones which added more than just a layer of moving your own body more, but additionally also added interactions with other people as well such as communication or competitive aspects. I can see a lot of different applications of this as a sort of middle-ground between "quick and dirty" prototypes which can be made easily and cheaply, and more sophisticated ones which might take longer and be potentially more functional. This was definitely on the quicker end of the spectrum however, which is intriguing, I thought it would be more complicated than it was.

[prototypingforcrumbs]

Design lab 26/1

We went through what the different machines do and what tools are available in the Design Lab, as well as procedures for how to use them and safety instructions. This included the vacuum former, band saw, circular saw, jig different belt sanders as well as an assortment of handheld tools.

While the learning for this workshop is mostly around the usage of tools and how to use them safely, this was still fairly rewarding in itself since it will be useful information as we progress through our education. We also got some examples for when to use what machines and the decisions that can back up this decision, which will be useful, too.

I wish that we had an opportunity to see the laser cutter in action, but this apparently had to wait until we actually use it to learn more about how it works, since in regards to corona safety measures they couldn't demonstrate this. At least we got a thorough walkthrough of it yesterday (25/1), but due to restrictions of showing us how it works over zoom, they still want to be present when we use it the first time, which is reasonable.

[prototypingforcrumbs]

Arduino Session #1 (26th Jan)

Today we learned some basics about Arduino boards, how they work, what they can be used for and how to interact with them. We got to try out both creating simple circuits with lamps, as well as programming these in different patterns. We also learned how to read wire diagrams and assemble a circuit from reading them.

The boards and what they can do is wildly broad, and I can see why they are a part of our education. It's a bit unclear how widely they are used themselves, but I can imagine that something LIKE them are used extremely broadly in different things with functions that require fairly simple electronics or sensors and interactions.

Considering how modular it is, this will likely be useful in many different ways going forward. For the prototyping aspect in general, the applications are seemingly infinite. I really look forward to working more with them and using them in practical settings where they might fit in prototyping, but I'm also trying to think of ways they might be able to be used in everyday-life. It could be something as simple as a lightswitch for when it is dark outside, that avoids having to be programmed for sunrise and sunset, since it can instead be strategically placed to tell how bright it is outside, for instance.

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Houde and Hill - What do prototypes prototype

Disclaimer: These first few posts of the journal might end up being slightly lacklustre, seeing as how the instructions for the reflective journaling was presented after certain learning opportunities, and as human memory is flawed, it did not allow for the kind of "in the moment", reactionary nature of post that seems to be sought after.

We've read the Houde and Hill text called "What do prototypes prototype". At large, the text was about attempting to change the language around prototypes, as well as presenting a model that could be used for talking about them in an efficient manner. They displayed a large amount of different kinds of prototypes that fell into different parts of this presented model (Role, look and feel, implementation and integration), to make a point of how different kinds of prototypes can be used for different things you might be interested in learning about a project.

All in all, I found it to be quite intriguing. They managed to convince me that this was a reasonable model to use when thinking about prototyping, I was able to contextualize some of the prototypes in how they might work for the ideas we have for our upcoming/current group project. They also presented a varied array of different kinds of creative and less creative, and successful and less successful prototypes, which really helps you to think about what might need to be considered when developing a prototype oneself. At this point I have not found the time to read the other text, but I intend to do so this week.