Reading these articles have shown me that prototyping, sketching, making mock-ups, all exist to fulfill a unique role in the design process. In “What do prototypes prototype”, we learn its three purposes are showing a product’s role, its aesthetics, and its implementation. In “Experience Prototyping”, we see that this study fits in closely to understanding a product’s “look and feel” from the user’s perspective. I relate the term “mock ups” very closely to prototyping, as opposed to sketching, because there is generally a more concrete object that is the subject of the testing.
In my past experience in research science, we come across prototyping and design more often than a non-scientist would think. Essentially, all scientific experimentation is a prototype to predict how similar experimentation would affect a human subject group. Due to ethics of human experimentation and difficulty in testing, we use other mammal models when designing risky medical trials. If the experiment requires speed and high turnover, we’ll use simpler animal models such as sea urchins, fruit flies, yeasts, or single-celled bacteria. Because so much of our genetic information is conserved between humans and simpler species, it makes sense to experiment on what is cheaper, easier, more efficient to grow in the lab, as long as the functions being tested remain the same. In designing experiments, one must consider how much time you have to accurately get results, at what cost, and what deadlines you’ll make. Often times, experimenters will make prototypes of more complicated experiments in order to get quick results to present. This is just a brief example from my past experience showing how prototypes and design process exist in numerous different fields.
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