2_dore.jpg… is not just fiddling around,

…but in fact a recent species of the tools used in concept design.

Some designers are good at sketching with a pencil on paper (Sketching is a necessary part of design, like ‘writing field notes’ is for anthropologists). When interaction design started to mature (a bit, the field is about 40 years old according to some people), the paper prototype, the Wizard of Ozz trick and the ‘enacted video’ became popular, trying to capture more of the ‘look-and-feel’ of the form of the *interaction* with the product (the dynamics, i.e., seeing how what you do effects what you perceive, and so on) instead of just the physical form of the product itself.

But a paper prototype is just as much not moving as is a paper sketch. And a WoO you can do only once: your team-member can’t forever hide under the table with that laptop. And the enacted video is a video of other people interacting, so you cannot do it yourself to experience what you would experience while doing it.

High times have thus arisen for the true techies. You may come out of under your stones, where you have been hiding ever since people started shouting that design and user-studies are more important than hard-core programming. Because if you are capable of it (I’m not, but my respect is all for those who are) you might do concept design of interactive products by a new kind of sketching, using a new kind of pencil, that is, creating sketches using interactive hardware itself.

This, in fact, amounts to using a sort-of fully working prototype *as a sketch*. The prototype is therefore no longer the end product, it is part of the sketching process.

It is called: Sketching in hardware. And there’s an annual conference. See this comprehensive blogposting

So if you are a student that gets complaints by teachers (me?) that you are not *thinking* and only *fiddling around with hardware*, you can now say: I am not fiddling around at all, I am sketching in hardware. (Beware if you are not *thinking* about what you are doing at the same time, though).

Slightly off-topic: Compare this to the practices of my anthropologist friends: imagine you would be able, using great skill and the right sort of tools, to create full-blown ethnographies (that is, the books one used to be creating  *after* returing from field study) including all the theoretical linkages and deep philosophical reflections, but this time on the fly, right there in Papua New Guinney, and let these ethnographies have a function not as being the end-result, but simply as a new kind of ‘field notes’, open to further reflection?

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