Aghillo

I love low-fidelity prototyping – in particular I love the way it often provokes a conversation which wanders well away from the original topic under discussion. The beauty of low-fidelity prototyping is it allows the viewer to fill in all the missing bits from their own perspective – it gives a really personal account of what they would want, on how they are already visualising it. It allows the imagination to run free.

This came back to me whilst at a workshop last week with Daria Loi, Lucy Suchman and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino who were discussing design prototyping. The ethnography work from the UX group at Intel looked interesting – but it seemed to be as much about shaping future markets and selling utopian science fiction stories as it did about understanding social practices. There was much talk of the political economy at work here – big organisations can bring all the clout of the mass media and celebrities to the table. Does this really free the imagination? Or does it simply provide an unavoidable view of the future?

Camera Tempus was a surprisingly enjoyable and eye-opening project. It’s struck me that in trying to achieve radical change you don’t necessarily need to start off from that position, or indeed make that intention explicit. Of course, the concept designer may internally hold some views on how they would like society to be changed, indeed perhaps radically changed, but using the design concept as a response provocation in itself has been insightful. Perhaps by exposing people’s views of the world and how they would like to see it is enough to begin to radicalise people.

From a design perspective, the most interesting observation is that it provoked a lot of innovative ideas from people. These ideas wouldn’t necessarily need to be implemented in any Camera Tempus product, but may be realised in many other ways. This supports the idea that a design concept may simply be used as a means to provoke responses around other topics, e.g. our relationship with the environment, rather than simply be an end in itself.

The use of low-fidelity prototypes is perhaps the most interesting aspect that has come out of this project. It’s clear now that the provision of an early-stage design concept in a graphical form is extremely useful in the elicitation of needs and wants and can be used to provoke innovative design concepts.