I thought this week’s papers were really
interesting, I guess it appeals to me since I like HCI and design. The thoughts
presented in both of the papers were intriguing. Especially the text “Comics, Robots, Fashion and
Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” (2009) by Fernaeus,
Y. & Jacobsson, M. I have not read a lot
about physical design before and thought it was a fascinating and innovative
way of working with design. I liked how the authors compared programming with
comics and fashion. I personally am not that fond of programming and think it’s
difficult and complex, and I’ve taken some courses in the subject. What about
people who doesn’t have an interest for technology or programming? I guess they
have an even harder time understanding programming. That’s why I think physical
programming is great. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about coding to act as
the programmer in the examples in the text; everybody can understand it and do
it. I’ve never thought of programming as they do in the text. For example that programming
is like fashion, you can combine different clothes and style to create a new
style. But in programming you combine different functions and modules to create
new programs. I’ve actually never thought of programming as a way to design
things. I’ve seen programming more like a puzzle; you put together a bunch of
letters, words and signs and if you do anything wrong it won’t work. I guess
that’s why I never liked it.
The other
text “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using
Vibration” (2008) by Réhman, S., Sun,
J., Liu, L., & Li, H. was also interesting. I’ve read about prototyping in
the book “Interaction
Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” (2011) by Rogers, Sharp and Preece. I personally really like the
prototyping step in a design process. I believe that it was really important in
this study as well. I can only reflect on projects I’ve done and before
actually sitting down and started making the prototype we have had a lot of
different thoughts of the product that were not coherent to each other. To explain
the product and how it works to other people would have been impossible with
different ideas of its purpose and functions. That’s why prototyping is great,
you can create a version of your product and when you do you might realize
things you didn’t think of before.
In this case with the vibration and the football game I think it would
have been difficult to evaluate their idea without a prototype. As a designer
it’s easy to think that everybody else understands what you’re doing and how
your product is suppose to work. To gather all the visual information you get
from a football game and turn it into vibrations is a complex process. Without
a prototype it would have been hard to get peoples opinion about the system and
how it was suppose to work. Prototypes are not always to your benefit. They also
have faults and downsides for example the prototype they develop in the text is
a high-fidelity prototype and it’s expensive to design and takes a lot of time.
Say that you put a lot of effort in designing a high-fidelity prototype and
when you test it you realize the target group is not at all interested in what
you’ve developed. Then you’ve spent all your time designing this product when
you could have been doing something more valuable. Another limitation with
prototyping is that if you show the users a prototype that is almost finished
it can restrict their thoughts. Most of them won’t come with own ideas on how
improving your product if it means rebuilding it. They will comment on colors
and fonts etc. since you’ve given them an almost complete product their
imagination will be limited.
In spite of the downsides of prototypes I believe that prototyping in
the future will play an important role especially when the design process and
the product are complicated.
Hi Cim, i like your discussion in the last paragraph about the advantages and disadvantages about using prototypes. You say that developing a high-fidelity prototype is expensive and takes a lot of time. Even if you build it and test and then see that the target group is not interested i still think that it can be good to have done this prototype because otherwise you might had develop the final design and that would have been even more expensive. I agree with your other proposed limitation that a prototype can restrict their thoughts. I wrote in my reflection that with a prototype, the users may think more about the prototype than the overall concept.
SvaraRaderaI see what your point, but I would rather prefer starting with a low-fidelity prototype since it is cheaper to develop and often takes less time and after that do a high-fidelity prototype. Another good thing with low-fidelity prototypes is that they are often not totally developed and often more like a "sketch" which invites the target group to criticize and evaluate the product with out having a clear image of it. Just like you say, one risk is that the users may evaluate the prototype itself more than the overall concept.
SvaraRadera