“Thinking through prototyping” and “Learning through watching”
The second paper on Thursday is “How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design”. They described five themes which are thinking through doing, performance, visibility, and risk. Especially, I am interested in thinking through doing (prototyping) and learning through observation. I really agree to their opinion about thinking through prototyping. Commonly, most company which is well-organized has development process for testing with prototype or engineering sample. It is helpful to understand user action and patterns and to reduce errors before developing commercial product. As shown figure 3 in this paper, they sketched, made physical mock-up, and made prototype. The first two steps are also important, but I think very important step is last one because it can show interaction between human and input device and between input device and graphic interface. In other words, designers have to consider interaction between device (input device) and device (graphic interface) for perception of human.
And the author shown an example about learning game device that a child learns through watching his or her father’s action. Watching or observation is good method to understand the matter or how to use, moreover they have to have best model for learning. I have two daughters, and first daughter is 31 months old and second one is 14 months old. Even if second one is just 14 months old, she sometimes learned through watching her elder sister.
But sometimes younger sister could not copy her sister's action because elder sister acted very complicated.
If you have best model, there are very complicated steps, is it possible to learn just observation? I means ubiquitous system or product designer understand that users always are not smart.