Models and iterations Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs iterationprototypes
The fastest way to learn something is to do something An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com Suppose you have a problem to solve. What do you do? Well, you sit down and think real hard, and after extensive and careful planning you try the well thought out and rigorous solution that you have thought up. Right? No, wrong! Bad. The correct thing to do when you have a problem is: Think for a short amount of time. Make sure it is safe to try things. Try something you think will work. Observe the result. If you succeeded, yay you solved the problem! If it didn't work, think about what that means for the nature of the problem and try again. The Feynman Algorithm problemsprototypesfeedback
Game feel An Article by Dave Rupert daverupert.com How do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry. Follow the funFollow the brush prototypesmakinggames
The Fidelity Curve An Article by Ryan Singer m.signalvnoise.com How do we choose which level of fidelity is appropriate for a project? I think about it like this: The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing. I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing. Four levels of fidelityTime to build versus confidence gained prototypesinterfaces
Functional Prototyping. A Missed Opportunity in Web Design An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com Prototyping allows engineers in various industries to “fail fast, fail cheap”, “select the best from the pool”, and “bring in the reality”. prototypessoftware
Drawing as a means of thinking Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’ The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool. Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray Section-perspective drawingThe situation talks backWhen we make a model and realize it's rubbish drawing