As part of our development process on the Tangible User Interface course at CIID we, as a group, decided to video prototype a lot of our concept ideas instead of sketching, as implemented traditional in disciplines such as Industrial Design, because we needed to be able to quickly make design decisions through an iterative storytelling process. This process quickly highlighted many pitfalls including one important, overlooked issue. The balance of abstraction. Below are the three films produced to explain three different concepts, each dealing with a different design opportunity identified in our user research.
I like the videos, and I enjoy their conceptual thinking but one major danger is that the connection with the user is severed here. By abstracting our concepts into primitive shapes and interactions we essentially limited our scope for people to understand the value of the concept to their everyday lives. This is exactly the problem we needed to avoid and was kindly pointed out to us by our advisor during this process, Durrell Bishop.
The main issue with these video prototypes remains that the affordances, specificity of function and attention to the variety of people’s lifestyles & behaviours were greatly overlooked. However, as an exercise in storytelling the films here show an area of learning for me in conveying ideas quickly and efficiently.
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