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 2008 from Unsworn Industries on Vimeo.

“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.”

Check the Telemegaphone web.

The other one is even better. This is the story:

“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.