Apologies for getting this out so late! It has been a busy Monday morning. At least there’s still the rest of the week to enjoy!
Don’t forget, if you haven’t already, go out and vote! Make sure you know where you’re polling place is and get there [most likely] between 7am and 8pm. Cheers.
and here we go…
Red Teases Future in DSMC
Red is about to change the game for Digital Still & Motion Cameras (DSMC). You guys thought the Canon 5D MkII was hot. We’ll see after Nov 13th.
Touchscreen Voting Machine Not Fit For Purpose?
Just make sure that if you encounter one of these, double check your answer. Triple check. You just never know whether or not if your vote switched.
Social Interaction Design Primer
Getting into social design? Johnny Holland has an interesting point of view on the differences between designing for user needs vs designing for user interests. The analogies used are worth thinking about.
Nokia Open Studio: Exploratory Design Research
We’re always excited to see more examples of how large companies are investing a great deal in advancing their methods to uncovering user needs. The output of this work is always inspiring.
Food Pyramid Lunch Box
Absolutely beautiful. Can we make this mandatory for all school to provide?
Visualizing How The World Views US Elections
It’s interesting because we’re so used to seeing how we view our elections. Instead, you consider how this impacts a global scale. Another food for thought: how much of this is represented by Americans with ties to these other countries? What are the implications?
Johnny Lee + YouTube = Future of Prototyping
The power of social media cultivates a world of sharing. Learn more on how Johnny Lee and many others are paving the way on helping the world become inventors again.
I was cleaning my desk the other day (something I should probably do more often) and it suddenly struck me just how many random little sketches and diagrams were scattered around my tabletop. There were stacks and stacks of paper sketches and many of them quite detailed and intricate.
Some collections were neat piles collected after a collaborative brainstorming session, but the vast majority were working sketches - that is, sketches used to think through ideas visually. If you do anything in the design world, this is probably not anything new to you. Most designers I know immediately reach for a pen and paper the moment they need toexpress anything that would take more than three words to describe.
This got me to thinking about the relevance of sketching in the digital age and the role it plays here at Artefact. Thinking about it more carefully, 4 major questions emerged that seemed worth exploring. Today I’ll be discussing part one of four, about sketching in general. Parts 2-4 to follow soon!
1. Why do designers feel the need to incessantly sketch?
Sketching is an invaluable skill for designers. The sketchbook is to designers what the voice recorder is to journalists, or the notepad to writers. It is the tool by which the early seeds of ideas are quickly captured and developed.
Imagining ideas is an innately human thing to do. At some point in the evolutionary process, humans gained the ability to not just remember stories and situations they had experienced, but to begin to imagine new situations and ways of doing things. In a way, those early story tellers were the first “user experience designers.”
Looking at the work of early humans it seems obvious that drawing is also deeply rooted in human development. Long before the written word, we were visually depicting the world around us. It provides a method of creative expression and exploration. Similar to the evolution of creative story telling, we moved from drawing things we saw around us, and began depicting things we imagined. This is where the process of design comes into play.
This section looks at three primary uses for sketching in the early ideatioin phase of design: as a way to transfer ideas from brain to paper, to rapidly iterate through concepts, and to build a working mental model of the design.
A Crutch for Short-Term Memory
When thinking abstractly and imagining new ideas, products, or features, we need a way to capture those ideas. Our brains can only store 4-7 things at any given time, and visual mental images last very briefly. Sketching provides a fast and natural way of bringing those ideas out of our heads and into the real world.
No matter how rough, the sketches provide at least mental cues as to what the ideas were and how they were imagined. Jonathan Fish in his research Cognitive Catalysis: Sketches for a Time-lagged Brain states that sketching’s “primary and privileged function is to support the user’s brain as he or she imagines possible objects.” To help facilitate this, it’s always great to have lots of paper or a sketchbook readily on hand. Ideas can come and go quickly, and capturing them before they disappear is critical.
Rapid Iteration
As we sketch this stream of ideas, we can begin to build on them and develop them visually on paper. These are what I like to call working sketches - sketches created primarily for oneself to simply work through and capture ideas in our head before they disappear into the ether.
Like Bill Buxton says in one of his many lectures on sketching and design, Sketches are quick, lightweight and non-committal, which makes them perfect for rapid and easy iteration. The fact that sketches are quick and lightweight is important - it prevents one from growing too attached to a particular idea or implementation. When rapidly capturing rough ideas and iterating on them, it often helps to stay as fast as possible.
The rough nature of the sketches also helps communicate to others that it’s a “napkin sketch” - (much like in this fun book and website, or less so like these sketches) something that shouldn’t be taken literally or as a final design, but simply as the core for an idea that can be developed further. I remember clearly what my senior ID professor had to say about it: ”never be married to your sketches.” “they’re cheap - you can create hundreds more.” “it’s the ideas you’re developing that are valuable, you should be fine with throwing the sketch on the ground and grinding it under your feet.“ Not that I literally walk around grinding paper on the floor, but the idea is that working sketches are a means not an end - a way of developing ideas further.
Often times, quickly sketching through an idea can reveal new connections or refinements, or equally likely that the idea simply won’t work as imagined. Like formal RITE studies for product concepts, these mini rapid sketch iterations either on our own or collaboratively with others can help us refine ideas, test them visually, and iterate further.
Developing a Mental Model
Working sketches don’t have to be literal representations of a visual idea - they can be abstract to explore relationships and properties. Examples include mind maps, process flows, metaphors, models, or some combination thereof, but they don’t need to be formal. They help understand larger problems through simpler models and they help one think through ideas - it’s like having a mini brainstorm session between you and the paper. Kate Rudder’s blog post ”The Joy of Sketch,” has a few examples, as well as this list on PSDTUTS.
Idea sketched as a model
These same techniques can be used when working through ideas with others. I can stand in front of you and describe my idea and try to communicate it with further and further words and vigorous hand gestures, or I can just grab a pen, walk up to a white board, and in a matter of seconds communicate my visual idea more succinctly and clearly.
At Artefact, it’s no accident that nearly every wall in our studio is covered with whiteboard material and cups of pens are all over the place. Even with yards and yards of blank white space, we are constantly erasing just to make room for new sketches. We also don’t just sketch in 2D on paper and whiteboards, but we’ll discuss that later in part 3.
Not just for Designers
You don’t have to be a designer or an artist to sketch your ideas. Everyone can communicate and drawing is just another tool by which to do that. We often host client workshops where we have participants - researchers, managers, engineers, business consultants, all those engaged in the project - to help generate ideas and capture those ideas on paper. Being intimately connected to the project, they can often provide great insight to the problems at hand, which we help them bring out during these collaborative sessions.
We encourage everyone to draw a picture - even if it’s just stick figures and boxes - to help describe their ideas.The sketches don’t have to be beautiful - that’s not the point (see above) - they just need to have enough detail to capture the idea. At this point in the design process, rough sketches ensures that everyone understands that these are ideas yet to be developed.
For these types of brainstorms or for any kind of working sketch, refined skills are not required, but can speed up the process for quickly capturing many ideas at a higher fidelity. For those looking to improve their sketching skills, there are some great resources like:
Whether in a big group or on your own, sketching is a valuable tool the process of design. It helps everyone be more creative, imaginative, and collaborative with their brainstorming, plus it’s just plain fun!
This post has been long overdue, but we have good reason for it, which I’ll cover in a second. First and foremost, I’d like to share a couple thoughts with you on the things that Bill demonstrated to us that day that really resonated with the group: you can sell the design by mimicking the experience on the spot, and that the best way to know how something works is by making it yourself (even if someone else has done it). Together, these examples make a great case on the power of prototyping and experimentation as a way to understand things.
For the uninitiated, Bill Buxton has been in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) arena for some time exploring the various ways people may interact with software experiences through input methods like touch, pen, etc. In other words, he has helped advance the understanding of all things cooler than the mouse, and more.
Selling Design by Example
Here’s a scenario: You’re in a review meeting, and your client isn’t quite bought off on the idea yet. They didn’t quite understand what a “synchronous multi directional touch based media reconfigurator” was, but the idea sounds cool enough! So how do you get them to really get it the same way you do? Mimic the experience, or really, live prototype. A live prototype enables you as a communicator of ideas and insight to demonstrate the vision by having someone participate in an activity that resembles the concept. The example Buxton makes is by pretending you’re Charles Xavier and you can move the mouse by waving your hand . While they waved their arms in the air, you would move your mouse according to their gestures. Yes, it sounds a bit crude, but the aha! moment is completely worth it.
Another example would be demonstrating different ways of doing collaborative white boarding. Bill asked yours truly to stand on the other side of our opaque doors. We would both write with dry erase markers at the same time. Surprisingly, we did not conflict with each other while writing and ended up with a nice image of a man and his dog smoking a cigar. The idea here is that as other people join the session to collaborate, their shadows provide enough feedback to indicate their position. This reduces the uncertainty in where and how people will work together in a shared spac;e especially thinking about this in terms of remote collaboration.
Now, this isn’t something that you do as a planned activity, but a skill that you become familiar with incase you need that extra bit of push to get things in the right direction. The beauty of this is how low tech it can be and how easy it becomes to learn about an experience without having to do so much work up front. This concept leads into the next idea of learning by doing.
MAKE Experiences
This isn’t exactly a new lesson learned, but a great one to remember. In the business of designing new experiences, our role is to be experts in that space. Sometimes the best way to really understand how that might actually work out is by simulating it right in front of you. Think of this as a live prototype, except you are afforded a little more time to play things out and use resources that have qualities that make for a better analogy. Those tools are coming out in a grassroots fashion where the Wiimote and all inclusive touch enabling projectors are becoming affordable components to hack and build on. We no longer need to wait for some company to commercialize the technology. We can go to the store and pick up the pieces and learn about emerging technology by being a part of the invention.
Closing Thoughts
For the most part, he discussed touch input and technologies, which is quite relevant to our times today. As the greater population familiarize themselves with touch enabled software beyond just the ATM, it is important that we continue to experiment and learn best practices regarding the various applications they will be engaged in. Luckily, we are becoming more fluent in methods that enable us to get to answers much quicker, without the need to break the bank.
The visit really helped reinvigorate the inventor in all of us. Everyone needs to continue to play and make things that don’t really result in anything but an understanding about the intricacies of different experiences. There are inexplicable things that we gain by practicing with our other senses. So we want to thank you, Bill, again for talking to us and sharing your spirit of getting down and dirty. We’ve taken that drive to continue our work with Frontier projects and the nifty little things that are coming out of it (link to DIY table). Now you see why we’ve been so busy getting this post out!
by Kevin Wong, posted November 3rd, 2008
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