How and When Prototyping Practices Affect Design Performance
"How does the structure of prototyping practice affect learning, motivation, and performance? In this talk, I will describe research on iteration and comparison, two key principles for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our results also demonstrate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel - as opposed to serially - leads to more divergent concepts, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. This talk highlights relevant research in cognitive and social psychology and shares the results of our preliminary design studies."
(Steven Dow, 19 November 2009, Google Tech Talk)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Rolling Wave Project Planning
"Rolling Wave Project Planning (RWPP) is a phased iterative approach to project development, applicable to new product development, information systems and other technical development environments. It is an excellent formal project development approach for inventive work. When done well, it balances structured process with flexibility. It is appropriate for project life cycle models/methods that allow incremental development (spiral, evolutionary prototyping, etc.)."
(Gregory D. Githens, Catalyst Management Consulting)
Rolling Wave Project Planning" (PMI Symposia Proceedings '98NPD Track)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Design Thinking: a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centred design ethos
"Design thinking is ... a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like [Thomas] Edison's painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration. ...
Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process - the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. To be sure, this approach has stimulated market growth in many areas by making new products and technologies aesthetically attractive and therefore more desirable to consumers or by enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising and communication strategies. During the latter half of the twentieth century design became an increasingly valuable competitive asset in, for example, the consumer electronics, automotive, and consumer packaged goods industries. But in most others it remained a late-stage add-on.
Now, however, rather than asking designers to make an already developed idea more attractive to consumers, companies are asking them to create ideas that better meet consumers' needs and desires. The former role is tactical, and results in limited value creation; the latter is strategic, and leads to dramatic new forms of value."
(Tim Brown, 2008, Harvard Business Review)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
