Why some products are nice and other sucks? Why sometimes everyone realize that a product has tons of lacks except their designers? Is because it was designed by stupids?
One of the things that I’m learning, let’s say, in the background is the significance of the details. The product creation requires lots of small decisions. Every decision is constrained by circumstances that the designer cannot change, you have to live with them. But every single decision will change the final product.
We’re living in a world with millions of high qualified engineers and designers. Not so many are stupid and they capable to do their own job well. A product creation needs one smart sprinkle and a lot of hard work. Everyone can be smart for a second, but is the care in the details what make the difference between a good product an a bad product. Is the the attention that you put in every decision and how to take it, because once you decide you open a new brunch in the “solutions space” and after that is hard to get back.
Here we’re learning several tools or ways to design to help us during the process, involving users, designers, clients… but at the end is the designer who should take the decision.
During the second project, Physical Computing, we visited Unsworn Industries. They are an Interaction Design studio based in Malmö and formed by two previous students from K3. The talk with them was quite inspiring for all of us. If I could choose how I would work in the future I would choose the way they work: The’re a small company, very creative, travelling frequently to cool places and festivals and doing great product in a wide range from interaction design to “new media” art.
In their cool portfolio I think that two works stand out from the rest. The first one is quite arty, but gorgeous.
“Telemegaphone Dale is a seven-metres tall loudspeaker sculpture on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. Anyone can dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number and have the sound of their voice projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale.”
“In a big campaign in 2007 the department asked the public for suggestions on how to reduce car traffic in Malmö. In reply, they received over a thousand wise, clever and provocative proposals from the citizens.”
Instead of keeping these ideas in a book the council wanted to create public debate, so they contacted with Unsworn and working together they created the Parascopes. Parascopes are devices which show alternatives visions of Malmö according to citizen suggestions. This is one of these products that make me exclaim “I wish I had invented them! ” Simple and beautiful concept.
Furthermore in the visit they gave us some interesting tips. I think I’ll talk about them in another post.
This (the title of this post) is what a teacher told us when we show him a software prototype in an early stage of the design process.
If we want a good feedback of our product, what should we show to the user during an interview?
What happens if you show a software prototype to an user? A software prototype is something that gives the impression of a “finished product”. So if during an interview you give them a software inside a computer they will only say “It’s nice, It’s cool, I like it” but no any useful information.
A prototype by definition must look unfinished and several kind of mockups could be useful. This means from paper mock-ups to simple boxes.
““In summary mock-ups become useful when
they make sense to the participants in a specific
design language game, not because they mirror
“real things”, but because of the interaction and
reflection they support.”“
I was sceptical about the amount of information that those primitive sketches could provide us. But they revealed as a good tool both to communicate between the team and to test several use qualities without the time-costing process of writing a software. This doesn’t exclude the software prototypes, only postpone them until a later stage.
Another question that I wonder yesterday was: “If I want to get the user attention during participative design, a good way is impress with eye-candy technology”, so “what to do” is never written in a book.
As I said previously, Interaction Design master in K3 is based on projects, so most of the time we are on the studio working together to accomplish the design goals. During the first project, around twice a week we had workshops about a specific topic. The theme for the first project was “mobile computing” but the learning goal wasn’t only Mobile computing interaction but also, and mainly, user centred design.
To be user-centred during the design process, is not enough thinking about “What the user wants?” if you really don’t know who the user is or if you just think about the user as a stereotype. Actually most of the people involved in a product development tend to think that the user is just someone like themselves. To fight against this trend there are several of procedures that a designer can use. One of the most famous is “Personas & Scenarios” and we had a related workshop during the first days.
The place where I study is called K3. Konst Kultur och Komunication (School of Arts and Communication) and the masters is pretty old, for the interaction design field: It began on 1998.
This interaction Design Master is based on projects. We have six different topics to explore during the first year.
Mobile Computing
Physical Computing
Place-Specific Computing
Massmedia and Interactive Media
Critical Design
Individual Project
Several of our projects involve cooperation with external partners, whether it’s a company or maybe an ongoing research project at K3. In this first project we work with TAT and we’ll collaborate with LivingLabs or “BluePromo”
The workload strongly depends on yourself. In Spain I used to spend 4-6 hours a day in lectures and about 2-3 in labs. Here is different because we’re studying design, not engineering but the fact is that we only have approx 15 lectures/workshop hours during the week. The rest of time we are in our studio working on our own. It seems quite common in Swedish education that students have so much free time, so they need to take care of their own career.
Second year students told us: “This master could be whatever you want. They give you guidelines, and support but all the rest depends on you. You can choose how far you want to go.”
Actually we do have a few minimum deliverables for each project but they encourage you to go further. For instance, one of the first days, Rob Nero (a second year student) showed us a prototype of his first year’s personal project. Take a look at the video.
It’s quite impressive, the concept behind the prototype is the most important job for us, but he also wanted to actually build it and he did!
I’ve been living in Spain for a long time. I was born there, grew up there and lived there until a few weeks ago. I even got an university degree there: “Telecommunication Engineer” (Perhaps the geekest degree in Spain). Furthermore I worked as a researcher, webmaster and sysadmin… but not for a long time.
In a certain way, I’ve always been interested in the relationship between technology, people, society… So last year I realized that I didn’t want to work in the background of chips and code. What to do? I didn’t know. I had heard a little bit about something called “Interaction design”. I dug deeper and found out that it was what I was looking for. I applied for K3 at Malmö university, they admitted me, and here I am (More details in the future)
My aim is to use this blog to document everything I’ll do here to become an interaction designer. I’ll write about lectures, workshops, books, projects…
