Cartoon House 2…..

On Friday, as a class we presented our CIID Cartoon House we had been working on. The aim of  the exercise was to think about how a home could be different in the future and to create visual representations using paper based medium. After we had created our cartoon house we then narrated a walk through…..by doing this exercise it allowed us to see where changes could be made, what ideas were unrealistic and triggered new thinking and ideas around what technology could be used to implement the ideas.  Making the cartoon house was a great way to a story and explain persona’s. The technique originates from Interval Research where they used it as a development tool.

I really loved the exercise and thought it was a great way to quickly come up with ideas and rapidly prototype them in  a very active way….because ideas were in the home environment it gave them far more context which made it easier to critique and build a story around.

Starting to build the kitchen

brainstorming

materials

Virtual 3D video games in the living room!

Interactive widget window

Cartoon house…

A sneak preview of what we have been up to today and our plans for tomorrow!

Bill Verplank: interaction-design-paradigms

For the past few days we have been very lucky to have Bill Verplank teaching us. Bill is hugely experienced and has had a profound influence in the pioneering and emergence of Interaction Design as we know it…….

“His PhD from MIT was in man-machine systems. At Xerox from 1978 to 1986 he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star graphical user interface. From 1986 to 1992, he worked as a design consultant with the author to bring graphical user interfaces into the product design world. At Interval Research from 1992 to 2000 he directed Research & Design for Collaboration. He has helped to establish the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and is a visiting scholar in haptics in the Music Department at Stanford University”

(http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/BillVerplank)

On Wednesday Bill ran an open lecture explaining the context of the history and future of interaction design  and the way people think about the subject. He described the process of designing interactions with beautifully concise diagrams. He’s ability to draw and write at the same time it amazing!

Here are some photographs from the talk.

Rather than me telling you what Bill talked about i would suggest that you watch the same lecture on the ‘designing interactions’ website

Visual Notes from design theory!

Here are some visual notes from my sketch book from the last week.

some lovely theory….and a lot of post-its!

This week were are doing an intensive design theory week taught by Gillian Crampton Smith, Phillip Tabor and Bill Verplank. When i first heard we were doing a theory i presumed it would be a week of lectures and written exercises. However i have been proven wrong!! For the last two days we have had very insightful presentations from Gillian and Phillip talking about different models of interaction design, using notation within interaction design and metaphors in interaction design…All every fascinating. These talks were then reiterated by a series of rapid exercises to teach us how to put the theory into practice. Some of the exercises included; using flow diagrams, storyboards and state diagrams to map out user experiences, interactions from physical objects and different processes, creating mental models of systems and creating metaphors for different environments. These were very quick exercises that involved a lot of post-its and some quick thinking!

flow diagrams for making a recipe

state diagram of a coffee machine

playing with metaphors

‘riding a bike it like balancing your finances’