In this week’s reading, I learnt about the methodology, tools and philosophy of prototyping, which is very intellectually stimulating for me. First I understood the difference between resolution and fidelity, which has always puzzled me when I do prototyping. I felt it is meaningless because I always work on fidelity not resolution, during which I lost the chance in prototyping of exploring, refining and rejecting ideas.
Second I learnt the three marks of prototyping: roles, look and feel, implementation. For the role mark, it can be purely a placeholder, sketchy version to define the role. And even if it is more like a visible interface like example five still its category belongs more to the role and less to the look and feel because this definition depends not on form of the prototype but the function of it.
In the look and feel mark, those prototypings test the intuitive interaction between the audience and the prototype. It can also help to promote the project within the community. However, the inexperienced audience may have more expectations for the design because they hold different understanding towards what prototype means. In my understanding this part should be more about resolution less about fidelity.
For the Implementation mark, the problem is that it may not be able to migrate successfully. So we should learn to using different tools in different dimensions or for different purposes.
Last but not least, I learned that simple representation makes effective prototype. The pizza box for architect’s laptop is a lovely example. Also when I watching the video about prototyping Toast AR, I learned that low-tech representation can also make really intuitive and concise prototypes. All of those examples inspired me a lot to dive deeper into the prototyping when doing design assignments.