Moving Things and the Anatomy of Prototypes
Moving Things
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- eaching in Umea
- examples of student work: very fast projects - limited ability to prototype behaviors, faking it with video
- easy to refer to and mimick human behaviors
- but it's hard to articulate a vocabulary around different qualities of movement
- looking for other modalities to describe (as the Futurists did)
- consequences: you have to build stuff in order to ground design decisions
- synthesizing movement (esp organic movement) is really tough! we need better tools
- but the results can be fun
- Kristofer Polhem's alphabet of movement
- Babbage's sign language for the movement of machinery - kind of obscure
- Labanotation - but you have to be trained!
- taking inspiration from CAD/animation software
- Fischer Technik kits
- Parkes/Poupyrev/Ishii article on Desigining Kinetic Interactions for Organic Interactions
Anatomy of prototypes
Lim, Stolterman, and Tenenberg 2008 (behind subscription wall at ACM)
Systemic approach to prototypes and prototyping
past attempts to identify prototypes
fidelity level - not a great way to approach -- all in how prototypes are framed, and you can't separate prototypes from the activity they
dependent on type of activity
Lichter et al (1993): from software, 4 types: (1) presentation prototype, (2) proper prototype, (3) breadboard, (4) pilot system
Principles of Prototyping (from Lim, Stolterman, Tenenberg)
fundamental prototyping principle
economic principles
filtering dimensions
manifestation dimensions
why this is interesting
relationships between dimensions are complex
develop enhanced relationship to prototype quality
use as a thinking guide when planning
a "good" prototype is very dependent on what you are trying to explore, evaluate, understand