In this week’s lecture, we learned about prototyping’s definition, goals, and how to use physical computing to complete prototyping. In this week’s studio, we built a prototype to help preschool teachers getting their students quiet, and assisting them to move from one activity to another. We first brainstormed some possible ideas and made three final concepts. The first one is to connect an alarm with a timer. the second one is to connect a press button with an MP3 player and a speaker. The last one is to connect an MP3 player to a timer. After considering about the desirability, feasibility, and usability, we decided to use the second concept to build the final prototype. We first found a power source and then a switch to turn on or off the power of the entire system. After that, we used a pressed button, an MP3 player, and a speaker. Prototyping is an important part of the HCD process and method. It summarizes and shows the entire design thinking and feasibility. Therefore, a good prototype is essential to bring concepts to live.
We chose the most simple concept based on the three concepts we developed from the scenario. We believe this prototype should be simple and easy to use so that teachers don’t have to spend time on learning how to use this machine. When they first touched it, they can use it, and this is the idea of this final concept. In the future, we would like to try to connect a timer to the current prototype, since only the press button may not satisfy the purpose of use. However, we were unable to do that in this week’s studio, mainly because of the limitation on the electronic components.
In the future, prototyping is the final step for many design work and engineering work. Therefore, it has several areas to apply. Interaction design is the most connected area. Interaction design needs a prototype to illustrate the designer’s thinking is appropriate and convincing. For example, in my prototype, if we use a timer to replace the press button, the system will not work, because the interaction between the user, the timer, and the MP3 play is a bad and inconvenient. As a result, if the designer wants to prove he is right, a prototype is necessary. However, visualization is not appropriate for prototyping. Visualization is using information and purifies the information to generate more useful information. However, prototyping is another concept since it focuses on building new things. In the future, with the knowledge and skill I gained from prototyping, industrial design and engineering are the two prioritized areas of study since they utilize the three goals of prototyping which are desirability, feasibility and usability.
