Week Two Lecture Notes: Process & Context

Context for use; Contexts of use- These are two major keys to unravelling the process of your product and design idea to form a collective and completed product.

There is vast variety of questions to consider, it may be exhausting and overloading to the mind, but there are so many outcomes, design principles, materials, functionality and purposes that create a successful product. Without consideration of all aspects of an idea, the prototype and model phase can be even harder to comprehend. By expanding your mind to appropriately engage a high end product with multi-purpose functionality, is a beneficial process. There is a flow of brainstorming, research and practice when creating, although within that flow are smaller paths to consider and render; that will ultimately help reach your end goal and present your ideal physical product that started from a thought process of ideas.

Summary

• Flowcharts, tables, sketches, story boarding and notes help create an objective of context and guide the process of creating an initial idea into functionality and physical form.
• Precedent Research- studying existing products for ideas, observation, interviews, testing prototypes.
• When designing there are key elements to consider to ensure your product is adaptable and fully useful. These elements to consider are:
• What- people are trying to do
• How- they may try to do it
• What- gets in the way or helps
• Where- they might be doing it
• There are also ideal context questions to consider asking yourself when creating that can help ensure meeting all requirements of your product, to appropriately suit your target audiences’ wants and needs. For example:
• What is the situation?
• What’s the setting or environment in which the interface or the device will be used?
• Is it public or private?
• Is it conductive?
• There are functionality questions to consider as well as context. Personal usage can range on a large scale and products should be suited, to ensure proper usage and positive contribution to daily lifestyles. For example:
• Who will be using the device or interface?
• Will it be used by one person, or multiple people?
• How long will the interface be used?
• Will the person be able to focus on their task, or will they be interrupted while using it?
• Does the experience need to be extremely simple?
• How much complexity can be accepted?
• What are the persons needs and goals?
• What are they trying to accomplish or complete?

Reflection

Interactivity is build upon an abundance of questions, researching and practice. Before any product can be created, there is a process of questioning everything you possibly can about such product before any prototype can become physical. It is highly important to outline key questions of a product, to completely understand the context, purpose, functionality and production of a product; without mapping, questioning and researching, there is bound to be holes within a product that will not form successfully.