Seminar 2 - Josefine Martinsson

Chapter 6 is about the part of the design process where there is a lot of brainstorming and when it comes to ideas it is, as they say in the book, about quantity over quality. This is a part which we are now passed in my opinion. Reading about it I feel like we did a lot of the things being talked about during our brainstorming and the structuring of our ideas.   

 Pictures from our brainstorming and structuring of ideas.

During the brainstorming we came up with a lot of ideas and used “analog” methods such as pen, paper, whiteboard and post its. I believe, just as the literature, that this really helps the process and keeps the flow going. What we did not do was keep away all technology, we still had laptops present and there was some multitasking present, which perhaps we should avoid in future projects as well as focus even more on the quantity over quality of ideas. But I do think that we had a great environment during this part of our project where all kins of ideas were welcome and we had a lot of fun!

The next stage of the design process is Refinement, which is discussed in Chapter 7. I would say our project is currently at the end of this stage. It is all about refining the ideas the team came up with during the brainstorming by considering constraints and various principles of interaction design. We talked about constraints already during our brainstorming, which perhaps should have been saved for this, and I believe we have done a good job taking them into consideration. The various principles really intrigued me, especially since some of them could have solved the problems we found with the interaction today at Naturhistoriska. Especially feedback and feedforward is something we found issues with and something I think we should focus on in our design. I also found The Poka-Yoke principle very interesting. I would like us to work with scenarios as we finish this stage.

The last chapter, Chapter 8, is all about prototyping, testing and development and is the stage we are going to next. While the development part of the product is not something we will do during this course; prototyping and testing is very relevant for our project. We have limitations here, both in the skills available in our group but also the time at hand for doing this. I think this seemed like a huge task at first, but I liked what Tod Zaki Warfel said about prototyping in the book: 

You dont’ have to prototype everything - it’s a prototype. And prototypes, by definition, are incomplete.

This made the task seem less intimidating. 

I believe we should work with paper prototypes at first, which we did a little bit already during about idea stage, and work our way to a digital prototype. I am looking forward to the prototyping and testing and I believe it will be a very new and challenging part of the course.

Questions: What are some good scenarios we can work with? With the limits in skills and time what are good approaches when we work with prototyping?