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?

Design in progress

We seem to using the One38 tag for our latest design collaboration around innovative student experiences. I’m working with 3 others – think hard and you might just work out the inspiration behind our name. For those interested in lovely numbers:138 when expressed as prime factors is 2x3x23 – the group are still reeling from this observation…

So, what are we up to? The grand master plan is dig deep into state of the art experiential learning environments and the so-called knowledge economy. It’s been fun so far – researching trends across business and education and linking them into community building and collaboration. If there is a phrase emerging it’s Time & Space.