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The Effect of Physicality on Low Fidelity Interactive Prototyping for Design Practice

This paper highlights the importance of designing the correct type of prototype during the early stages of the design process of information appliances, such as mobile phones, cameras and MP3 players. The aim of this research was to draw out how physicality can be used by the designer to create efficient low-fidelity prototypes. The efficiency of a prototype is of great importance; an efficient prototype can supply reliable data for a fraction of the cost of a high fidelity prototype enabling an iterative process.

The concepts of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ physicality are introduced where ‘passive physicality’ describes how a prototype looks and feels offline and ‘active physicality’ describes how a prototype and its software react to users. Traditionally commercial companies made physical prototypes that were more focused on ‘passive’ aspects and used them together with interactive software only prototypes. In recent years, with the advent of electronic prototyping platforms such as the Arduino, highly interactive prototypes have been made that focus more on the ‘active’ aspects. This research suggests why these approaches are not an effective and efficient way of prototyping in the early stages of the design process.

The results of the study show that both active and passive physicality are important considerations for early stage user feedback; but it is an even balance of these that produces the most effective prototypes. This is a significant finding because it highlights that resources should not be used exclusively to ensure the prototype functions well in an electronics and interaction sense (active physicality) if it severely impacts the ways the prototype looks or can be held by the user (passive physicality). Likewise, resources spent creating a prototype that looks very close to a final device are not effective if interactions are not well supported.