Empathise

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Empathise

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Data Collection

Outcomes

Ideas

Early Research isn't Everything. Research conducted during the early stages of your Design Thinking project does not tell you everything you need to know in order to create the optimal solution. Regardless of whether you have researched thoroughly and gathered a large body of information, or whether your ideation sessions have resulted in what many perceive as a world-changing solution, testing is still crucial for success.

Design teams can easily become fixated on the research artefacts they have gathered during the earlier phases of exploration, creating a bias towards their ideas. By prototyping and then testing those prototypes, you can reveal assumptions and biases you have towards your ideas, and uncover insights about your users that you can use to improve your solutions or create new ones.

You can use prototyping as a form of research even before other phases in Design Thinking, allowing you to explore problem areas in interfaces, products or services, and spot areas for improvement or innovation.

Some of the purposes that prototypes fulfil are:

 

Exploring and Experimentation You can use prototypes to explore problems, ideas, and opportunities within a specific area of focus and test out the impact of incremental or radical changes.

 

Learning and Understanding Use prototypes in order to better understand the dynamics of a problem, product, or system by physically engaging with them and picking apart what makes them work or fail.

 

Engaging, Testing, and Experiencing Use prototyping to engage with end users or stakeholders, in ways that reveal deeper insight and more valuable experiences, to inform design decisions going forward.

 

Inspiring and Motivating Use prototypes to sell new ideas, motivate buy-in from internal or external stakeholders, or inspire markets toward radical new ways of thinking and doing.

The meanings of "design research" explained: research for, into, and through design by Mehmet Aydın Baytaş is an episode in a series of podcasts and articles on the theories and practices of design. You can listen to the podcast or read the article here. Some takeaway points:

 

There is a list of 3 options for what "design research" can mean. These are introduced in an article titled Research in Art and Design, published in 1993 by Sir Christopher Frayling. He proposes three categories of design research: Research for design, research into design, research through design.

 

Most design research outside academia, in commercial product development, is research for design. In Frayling’s words, this is the "gathering of reference materials" that culminate in the form of a product.

 

On the subject of crafting deliverables – the reporting of design research must itself be well-designed, deploying excellent writing, graphic design, videos, and other media as fit. How quickly its audience understands the work is a major indicator of effective design research.

Research into design is research about design, with design and designers as its subject.

 

Research through design is to use design as a research method as an approach for learning about things other than design, gaining access to knowledge that would have been impossible otherwise. A modern example of research through design is user experience studies, where people engage with new inventions.

 

Certain insights on new products are impossible to obtain without having the actual design at hand. Showing something to people, rather than just telling them about it, leads to more relevant feedback.

 

The same applies to the designer's experience. As our sketches and prototypes develop towards the final form, so does our grasp on the consequences of creative decisions. As Bill Moggridge put it: "The only way to experience an experience is to experience it."

Doing Research

Doing Design

Artifact

Prototype

Knowledge

Design Practice

The term ‘prototype’, along with the verb ‘prototyping’, has become popular in design research, and especially so in interaction design. Originally, the term indicated a precursor of a mass-produced product, which shares its material qualities, but will undergo testing and development during implementation. In design research, the term ‘prototype’ is also used for all kinds of product-like physical constructions.

 

In interaction design, paper prototyping can be as simple as drawings on paper. Prototypes are a narrower category than artifacts. They are ‘like products’ in the sense that someone can interact with them and experience them, whereas sketches and blueprints are less direct representations about—rather than realizations of—intended situations and interactions.

 

In the Research through Design literature, some authors use the term ‘artifact’ (or, in British/Commonwealth English, ‘artefact’) with this meaning that we reserve for ‘prototype’, but without making the difference explicit. In this chapter, we use the distinctions above – that every prototype involves an artifact or artifacts, but that not every artifact is a ‘prototype’

The term ‘artifact’ originates in anthropology / archeology, and refers to a man-made thing, usually a material object. It will play an important role, because many researchers regard the things made by designers to be core to RtD.

 

Note: the term ‘artifact’ means something completely different in measurement methodology, namely an error in measurement such as a scratch on a photograph.

Low fidelity versus high fidelity.

Fidelity

Sketching

Paper Prototype

Wireframe

Digital Prototype

Mockup

Coded Prototype

Prototypes

Interactive Applications

The fidelity of a prototype refers to its level of completeness, functionality and detail. The degree of completeness of the prototypes you build depends on the stage of progress:

 

Low fidelity: low cost, rough and quick to build Medium fidelity: slightly more detailed, still rough but closer to the solution High fidelity: much closer to final, very detailed and much more time-consuming

 

This represents a scale of completeness or closeness to the final product, which differs depending on the type of solutions and needs of the situation. Prototypes can also have different parts with varying levels of fidelity.

 

For example, you can build a prototype with high visual fidelity but with low functional fidelity — which would be useful if you were testing the visual aspects, rather than functional aspects, of the prototype. The main aspects, which are the focus of the prototype, should receive more focus and, ideally, higher fidelity.

Sketching

Paper Prototype

Wireframe

Digital Prototype

Mockup

Coded Prototype

Prototypes

Interactive Applications

Paper Prototyping

Physical Prototyping

Hands-on making

You can write ideas on a piece of paper

We can think of materials as a physical entity like paper, paint, or wood. According to a simple definition, a material is a substance that a thing is made of. Ok, something physical? But what if the thing is purely virtual or intangible, what would be its material?

 

Let's consider material within and beyond physical entities. The obvious like paper and wood could be your material, but data could also be a material, or code, light, sound, or any material you have already collected during and for your current research.

A purpose is a long-term, meaningful goal with a desired end result. The purpose is achieved by successfully carrying out objectives. An objective  is a short-term, precise goal carried out in order to achieve a purpose.  

You can write the above on a piece of paper

Carelets is a collection of wearable accessories designed to promote environmentally conscious consumerism in order to create a global "just enough" consumer culture for a sustainable future.

 

Its objective is to help its users to understand the supply chain and waste management of things we consume. We argue that the supply chain and the production of consumer goods as well as the disposal of used goods are becoming more and more complex and invisible and therefore less apparent to the consumer itself.

 

By participating in the Carelets initiative one is encouraged to wear at least one Carelet to identify and monitor their purchasing behaviour. A Carelet provides one with an on-the-spot feedback when attempting to buy a new product. We provide users with an open database of supply chain and waste management information to monitor and evaluate a user's consumer behavior. A tactile response reminds you of a product’s impact on the environment.

During this one week long workshop (Singapore, 2015) we used methods from the open prototyping model developed by workshop facilitator FutureEverything.

A hallmark of human-centered design is rapid prototyping and iterating on the fly. A project team working in Ethiopia on designing a new device to plant teff—a grain and staple of Ethiopian cuisine—put our process to the test when a prototype of their planter came face to face with the Ethiopian soil.

 

Transporting the planter from San Francisco to rural Ethiopia was one thing, but the real challenge came when engineer and team member Ravi Prakash set out to push it through a field of muddy soil.

 

“Suddenly, Ravi’s steps started getting smaller. Watching him was like seeing time slow down,” reported project lead Martin Schnitzer. “He was barely 50 feet down the field and the wheels had picked up enough mud to make it nearly impossible to move any further. We knew the mud would be challenging but we didn’t think it would render the planter useless so quickly. Deflated, we felt like we were thrown back to the beginning of our challenge.”

The team was quickly back in the shop of a local agricultural research center trying to figure out what to do with the planter’s wheels. They played with a variety of solutions, quickly moving through ideas like spiked wheels and skis, until one of the local metal workers had a suggestion: wrap the wheels in burlap.

“Wrapping the wheels in burlap isn’t an idea we could have ever come up with in a brainstorm,” said Schnitzer, ”and burlap certainly isn’t on any list of new high tech materials. However, using burlap came from keeping an open mind to trying new solutions. It came from talking to people who understand the conditions best and by sharing the excitement of this project with others to gain inspiration from a number of places.”

In the end, burlap worked wonderfully well. And though the wheels of the final product are made of harder-wearing stuff, the burlap fix allowed the team to get back out into the soil and test other elements of the planters with the farmers who’ll use them.

Improvised code development in 10 steps. A basic sketch showing how to draw small squares on a digital canvas is combined with a noise algorithm and then, as it progresses, transforms into kinetic typography and finally into a sound-based animation of rectangles floating in virtual space.

Highs

Lows

Now

Then

Highs

Lows

Now

Then

Idea A, derived from warmup 1 

Create an object that addressed the outcome from Warmup 1.

 

Idea B, derived from Things you will bring 1

Create an object that is inspired by one of the objects that you brought with you.

 

Idea C, derived from Things you will bring 2 

Create an object that represents or embodies one of the ideas you have drawn out.

Make A, use your own materials  

Start making with one or more of the materials that you brought with you

 

Make B, use materials provided

Start making with one or more of the materials provided by the workshop

 

Make C, combine 1 and 2

Start making using any of the materials from above, do make sure to return the materials after the workshop if possible.

As a team you can work on 2 individual prototypes or on 1 together.

Bill Moggridge

was a British designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO