Psychological and Cultural Effects of Early-Stage Prototyping
Looking back at my first month as an experience design student at Hyper Island, I realise how much more satisfied I’ve been with my work, compared to my design related job experiences before that. I believe that one of the main reasons for this is the practice of low fidelity prototyping that is at the core of the design process we’ve been following. Since I typically value quality over quantity, the enjoyment of making quick and dirty representations of half-formed ideas was surprising to me, so I decided to explore it deeper.
Developing Empathy through Experience Prototyping
In my experience, the more I empathise with the potential end-users of what I’m designing, the more motivated I am throughout the process. Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton Suri (2000) from IDEO suggest prototyping existing experiences in the beginning of the design process as a way for designers to develop empathy with people that are different from themselves. They introduce the term Experience Prototype and define it as “any kind of representation, in any medium, that is designed to understand, explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product, space or system we are designing”.
Buchenau and Fulton Suri give an example from a project where they had to design a product for patients with chest-implanted automatic defibrillators. To reproduce an experience similar to the one of the patients, the design team equipped themselves with pagers. Every time a designer received a signal on their pager, it would to represent a defibrillating shock. During the weekend, the designers were paged at random hours, and each time they had to capture the circumstances of what for a patient would be a shock.
After that the team discussed their personal experiences like anxiety around holding an infant, and social issues around communicating to passersby what medical help was needed. The participants then translated these experiences into patients’ needs like warning information for an upcoming shock and indication of the patient’s condition for bystanders.
Building Confidence with Low Fidelity Prototypes
Uncertainty is an inseparable part of the design process since “there is no direct path between the designer’s intention and the outcome.” (Bennett, 1996) How people experience uncertainty depends on their perceived ability to control the uncertain conditions. One of the ways to develop a feeling of control is through mastery experiences (Bandura, 1997). People are more likely to achieve mastery when large tasks are broken into moderately sized ones (Weick, 1984).
In the context of the design process, low fidelity prototypes are the small manageable tasks that buy practitioners perceived ability of control, help them navigate through uncertainty and accumulate learning. This is confirmed by an eighteen-month ethnographic study of a high-tech firm, performed by Gerber and Carroll (2012).
Their paper explores the psychological experiences of low fidelity prototyping from the point of view of the designer. It reveals that prototyping helps reframing “failure as acceptable and necessary, rather than something to be avoided, supports a sense of progress, and strengthens beliefs about creative ability. As such, this design practice helps practitioners to persist in the face of uncertainty.“ (Gerber and Carroll, 2012).
Overcoming Anxiety by Sharing Early Stage Prototypes
Designers rarely work alone, and experience design teams are usually comprised of people from various disciplines, and with different expectations. Eddie Obeng (2002) points out that when half of the time for a project has passed, many stakeholders expect to see half of the work done. He calls the contradiction between these linear expectations and the non-linear reality of the design process “the anxiety gap”.
The design process is about learning what works and what doesn’t and this learning happens through prototyping. By sharing early stage prototypes, designers can make their progress visible to stakeholders and avoid anxiety within stakeholders (Wildman and Durrant, 2013).
Furthermore, early stage, low-fidelity prototypes, in contrast to polished artefacts, invite feedback and promote collaboration. If design is thought of as a communication process, prototypes are at the heart of it. When they are rough, prototypes leave space for discussing the design. High-fidelity prototypes, on the other hand tend to irritate clients because they perceive the design as finalised without them having provided any input (Erickson, 1995).
Schrage (1996) divides innovation cultures into specification driven and prototype driven. Prototype driven cultures promote collaboration and trust between team members internally and with clients. Furthermore they breed designers that are more capable of empathy, more confident in their creative abilities and less risk-averse.
References:
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W. H. Free-man and Company.
Buchenau, M. and Fulton Suri, J. (2000) ‘Experience Prototyping’, Proceedings of Designing Information Systems, pp. 424–433
Erickson, T. (1995) ‘Notes on Design Practice: Stories and Prototypes as Catalysts for Communication’, Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development
Gerber, E. and Carroll, M. (2012) ‘The psychological experience of prototyping’, Design Studies, 33(1), pp. 64–84. doi: 10.1016/j.destud.2011.06.005
Obeng, E. (2002) Perfect Projects (New World). United Kingdom: Pentacle Works The Virtual Media Company
Schrage, M. (1996) ‘Cultures of Prototyping’, Bringing Design to Software
Weick, K. E. (1984) ‘Small wins: redefining the scale of social problems’, American Psychologist, 39(1), 40e49.
Wildman, G. and Durrant, N. (2013) ‘The Politics of Prototyping’
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