Closely related to the Critical Design movement is the concept of Provotypes: Provocative Prototypes. Today we made some. The assignment was to convince engineers that a certain thermostat system was too complex for end-users to work with in daily life. The thermostats were all in separate room and separately controllable, but if one would want the heating system to work optimally, one would have to set all the controls to the same value. The engineers’ position up until that moment had been that the users simply must learn to use the system, which wasn’t so complicated. We built a provocative prototype that would show how the current system was perhaps understandable, but still not workable, in practice, by the users. We created a balance beam with two plates. We called it the Balancing Breakfast. The engineers (just other students in our group) were asked to sit and eat from the plates. Only if you would eat in exactly the same rythm, and grab something from the plate at exactly the same time, would you be able to use this Balanced Breakfast. But of course in practice the balance would tip over and the food would be spilled on the floor. That way the engineers could understand what the problem is from the perspective of the end-user. That is (more or less) what a provotype is for. I mostly was interested in how the provotype evolved. I will write about that in another blog.

Popularity: 17% [?]