Article Critiqued: Dow, S., 2011, ‘How prototyping practices affect design results’, interactions, 18(3), pp. 54-9.
Summary
The article explains about the affect of prototyping practices on design results. Using Iterative practices in making designs can lead to better results. Instead of working on making a perfect design, Iterative practices helps designers to learn from their previous mistakes and give a better output. For example (cited in Bayles and Orland 2001), two groups were asked to make ceramics by a teacher. He accessed one group on quantity and the other group on quality. Surprisingly, the first group made many ceramics while learning from their mistakes while the quality group were just discussing about perfect design. This is a great example showing Iterative practice helps in making refinements to design process.
Making prototypes limit the design results to a certain extent. Prototypes can center the discussion on just improving it, instead of exploring more ideas. To explore better design ideas multiple alternatives should be considered in designing a product. There is also a parallel approach of making multiple prototypes at the same time. By sharing multiple designs you can explore more ideas and make design more diverse. Creating parallel designs helps in studying multiple possibilities and brings a fresh perspective in creating designs. Multiple designs can be used to make an effective design. Parallel designs are always open to new ideas and can give more diverse solutions to our problems.
Iterations help designers in improving the designs but also limit them to just one option. However, creating multiple designs give them opportunity to explore different design contexts. Some may argument on making...
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...sed to think that designing phase of a product development is not important. But now it seems that it is the designing process only which makes the product original. The product innovation is reflected through the designing process.
In terms of design methods, parallel prototyping approach should be used for better results. Applying these ideas in our work practice will improve the efficiency of products in the organization.
The Effect of Prototyping and Critical Feedback on Fixation in Engineering Design
Trina C. Kershaw1
, Katja Hölttä-Otto2
, & Yoon Soo Lee3
tkershaw@umassd.edu, kotto@umassd.edu, ylee@umassd.edu
Departments of 1
Psychology, 2Mechanical Engineering, and 3Design, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA 02747 USA
Lawson, Bryan. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. 4th ed. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006.
“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”(Rand, Paul)
The Design Way lays out the fundamental principals of design forming a diagram to approach the world. Authors Harold G. Nelson, a Nierenberg Distinguished Professor of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and Erik Stolterman is Professor and Chair of Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington (Design and Design Theory) provide an insightful look at the struggle to understand and interact with the complex world we live in. Nelson is also a Senior Instructor in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School and President of Advanced Design Institute. Currently, Stolterman’s main work is within interaction design, philosophy and theory of design, information technology and society, information systems design, and philosophy of technology grounded in careful analytical studies of the everyday practice of users and professionals dealing with interactive artifacts with a strong emphasis of building theory. Stolterman combines this approach with a strong critical and theoretical analysis of current practice (In...
Our individual performances could have been improved by taking more time and being more careful with the construction of the shapes, as well as thinking our plan out beforehand so we would know exactly which strategies would work. This project has furthered us as learners by teaching us to plan ahead and design different prototypes, create a successful product using sources, and use the design cycle to guide us in our future projects.
Design is one of the elements of today’s environment. We can see it everywhere as ideas and messages find their visual appearance in communication, identification and navigation. It transmits meanings and imparts know...
IDEO’s approach to the product design process is through a collective group effort that encourages suggestions, multiple prototypes, and...
Lawson, Bryan. How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified. NY: Architectural Press, 1980, 2007. Massachusetts: NECSI Knowledge Press, 2004.
David Haugen and Susan Musser. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2009. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from "Design Isn't Science." Journal Gazette 28 Aug. 2005. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.
However, this vision generates an overlapping problem between the marketing department and the product development department. The marketing department, among other duties, is responsible for the identification of new opportunities and also to assure the development of new products. Unless these activities are extremely well coordinated with the product development department, there will be misalignment in the strategy of the EPD. Ultimately, this misalignment will affect a third department, i.e. the manufacturing department, since it is directly involved in the product development process.
Wicked Problems in Design Thinking Author(s): Richard Buchanan Source: Design Issues, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 5-21 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/
Within these eight stages, problems can be framed, the right questions can be asked, more idea can be created, and the best answers can be chosen. The steps aren’t linear; they occur simultaneously and can be repeated. Although design is always subject to personal taste, design thinkers share a common set of value the drive innovation: these value are meanly creativity, ambidextrous thinking, teamwork, and user focus curiosity (Owen, 1993).
Focus shall be on utilizing pre-production tools while developing the prototypes. Actual material, wherever possible, shall be used in the development of prototypes rather than having substituted parts. Make the prototypes as closer as possible to actual outputs.
A new product on the market may look all shiny and new and be appealing to customers but what is the story behind the product and what is the underlying future for this product. Where were the original materials from? Is it all legalised? Where did the manufacturing take place? How was the product manufactured? These are all questions that are never properly addressed in the design industry and are just simply overlooked. They are the aspects of designing and producing a new product that need to be carefully looked at to make a good design, and to make sustainable products.
Hence, at this stage it is to explore and experiments with models, dummies and storyboards so that we can portray a glimpse of how the design will look like in reality, not to mention this method also can be used to convey ideas so that they can be understood in this context.
In the beginning lectures, I had no idea that brainstorming and conceptualizing an idea was part of an elaborate process to generate good product ideas. Great inspiration and a creative idea require deep thinking. I have learned that opportunity identification involves looking into the problems first rather than diving headfirst into the solution. Identifying and analyzing customer’s needs, market size, sustainability and scalability allows easy identification of low and high potential concepts. As stated in the article by Tim Brown (Brown, 2008), human-centric approach of innovation should be part of the design process as it gives insights into the life of an everyday person.