This week we delved into the world of rapid ideation, an area in which I already have some experience from my illustration degree. However it was interesting to come at it from a different angle, not one in which the aim is always a visual solution.
In this blogpost I will explore a little bit what was covered as well as some further research into some of the areas that interested me.
Here you can find a link to my tackling of this week’s challenge activity, and here is a link to the overarching weekly critical reflection.
Rapid ideation is simply the exercise of coming up with lots of ideas quickly, this was already covered in Week 2 when we were presented to the idea of creativity and idea generation. Where rapid ideation comes into its own is when it is then paired with prototyping and testing.
Within the design thinking methodology ideation, prototyping and testing form a feedback loop. You can test design decisions by creating prototypes and then testing them, taking those findings to inform decisions on what to change in the initial design or even redefine the problem. Figure 1 below from the Interaction Design Foundation illustrates this:
Fig. 1: Interaction Design Foundation: 2023. Design Thinking: A 5 Stage Process. [digital image]
In this weeks lectures Michael Scott describes prototypes as something “that allows us to generate answers to the most important questions and then move on to the next iteration” (Scott 2023). In other words then prototypes help us answer our own questions and validate our design decisions. The trick is to do this quickly so that you can move through ideas and designs quickly to get to answers and move forward with the better ideas faster.
You can create high fidelity (hifi) prototypes and low fidelity (lofi) protypes which I felt to be more the focus of this weeks work and challenge activity. As the IDF says: “Fidelity refers to the level of detail and functionality you include in your prototype.” (Interaction Design Foundation 2023b). The lower the fidelity the looser and broader the concept you’re testing and the higher the fidelity the closer it is to the finished prototype.
At the start of a project, lofi prototypes make more business sense as they are cheap and fast they therefore don’t require too much investment. The Interaction Design Foundation also adds that “Since they require less time to create, we are less likely to get attached to them, so they allow us to discard bad ideas more easily than high-fidelity prototypes do.”(Interaction Design Foundation 2023a) If we think back to Figure 1 we can see how this means that we might move faster through our ideas. We can’t get too attached to them at this stage or we might not move on to better ones.
There are several lofi methods of prototyping, the main thing to remember is to choose something that is appropriate to what you want to test (Interaction Design Foundation 2023a). There is no point trying to build a prototype out of lego for a digital banking app for instance. Personally I found it interesting to see that sketches were considered a prototype method, I had never considered them to be one but when I think back to why I sketch in the first place, I have to admit that I do it to test ideas and work something out.
Once this fact had fallen into place, I could see that in my illustration experience prototyping and ideation often bled into each other and didn’t necessarily feel like two distinct activities, especially in the beginning stages of working on a project by yourself. Below is an example of when I was working through ideas for a character inspired by a tram. For me this page is simply me thinking, testing, seeing if something works or not and tweaking as I go, now when I look at it I also understand that I was prototyping a character. Really the point of prototyping is just that: making an idea more real by bringing it into the world and out of your head so that it can be better considered and tested against the light of reality.
