Designing Through Prototyping

On the first day of the second week, we held the exhibition, where we presented our ideas and concepts behind the conversational agents that we all had developed. It was an extremely helpful session as we could get a range of responses from students, masters students and faculty.

The main responses that we got were:

1. The thought is completely hardware based and hasn’t been fully thought out from the perspective of the software.

2. The majority of projects were from the students’ perspective and our project was from the faculty’s perspective.

3. The context needed to be specified with more clarity.

4. The facility/product would be extremely useful as the problem identified is very common and frustrating.

5. Why isn’t the mobile phone being used as a tool?

This feedback was very helpful as we will know what questions to answer when we further develop our product. As mentioned by Scott Klemmer in his video ‘How to Prototype?’. That a prototype should be answers to the different questions that arise after viewing demos of the first raw prototype. Answers to questions that come up from feedback or introspection. Keeping a goal in mind, and building repeatedly to reach that idea- design through prototyping. Prototyping is the ‘approximation of a design for quick feedback’.

On the second day, we began with our basics in coding. It was my first ever coding class and I was very excited about it. I began to understand the basics and got a little lost as the complexity increased. But after re-doing a lot of it, I got certain things right and also started understanding them better. Even the slightest commands that worked gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

On Saturday, we began answering the questions we got in our feedback and also finding out our own loopholes in the project.