Reading Seminar 2 – Marcus Ahlström

The chapters contained in this week's reading seminar describe the different approches to: Going from a blank paper to an idea (brainstorming for instance), thinking thoroughly about the ways in which the user will use the product, design decisions, refining and lastly prototyping.

Reading this made me notice the massive amount of ways to tackle a problem while designing. It feels like we have only nibbled a bit on the edge of the entire cake. Our brainstorming sessions went along well although a bit fast and hectic. The method called brainwriting seems to be a good alternative to the one we used: Yes, and. A little bit more relaxed. As they said – most ideas often come inbetween the sessions. The bizarro world feels really interesting - the inverted way of thinking might bring a fresh perspective on a missed oppurtunity (Like when you mirror a picture to see hidden flaws when drawing).

The second chapter thoroughly went into the process of refining the ideas you got. Thinking about our project, I feel that user feedback will become an essential part of the project, especially when designing the interface and the way our remote will function. The concept of feedforward could be really useful when the guide wants to highlight a showcase, so the guide knows what is about to happen (maybe a faint light or something on the remote display) before the choice is made. Many of the tips in this chapter seem applicable to our project: Our interface for setting up the tour will take more of a sovereign posture while the remote used on the actual tour is supposed to be hidden and non-intrusive (almost daemonic).

The last chapter about prototyping had some interesting things in it. The thing about our eye movement in the west world compared to the east, going from left to right, top to bottom seems like a really important aspect. Furthermore the method about squinting makes sense, seeing areas of rest and detail (Don't want the interface to be all jittery noise). About the different prototypes, low- and highfidelity I feel we have to atleast make a lowfidelity one where we use the Wizard of Oz method (Using smoke and mirrors) before we go on. Our project is almost built for it and it will help encapsulate the feeling better. Later on they were talking about a work method named Agile, where you break down the bigger pieces into smaller ones and rigorously working on them. It does sound a lot like the Scrum method where you more or less do the same, work on separate modules, setting goals within each week. I wonder what the exact difference is.

My question: Are there any design projects where you would actually want the product to stammer (wait for 0.1 – 1 second) after a user input, instead of responding immediately?