Buxton describes sketching as an “archetypal activity associated with design”. I like his remark on the definition, yet I think all designs are also at some point “archetypal”, although I’m not a fan of making the whole concept of how we think and work be overly academic or static or certain, as the open and free spirit of sketching and prototyping is for the purpose of communication and production, not necessarily for setting examples for other designers to follow, since people think and work in their own ways, but I do appreciate that Buxton states that the whole design phase is an “iterative, user-centered process”, and in theory, sketching and prototyping are supposed to be a combined unit of transition.
In the Cardboard Computers reading, the author talks about personalizing the design tool to generalize it and make it approachable by the general public. It is ideal and utopian, and problems it may create will be beyond greater unemployment, thus those “tools” that ordinary people use to create things ought to also be “designed” (Adobe?), and the difficulty level of using the tools are supposed to be at certain intellectual degree, although the idea of open source is big and online communities of open source are extremely active. It does remind me of another aspect – I’ve read some work by Walter Benjamin, and one of his famous thoughts is on the “aura” of work (especially art) losing along with the development of technological reproducibility, and I am afraid that tools that are too generalized tend to reduce the value of its creations, and people who are originally more suited doing the job (AKA good designers) are to be put in even lower social situations. However, the idea of mockups are great: humanistic and effective, going with the idea of “being archetypal”, even though mockups that are attractive and really communicate with people are still hard to make – we will be glad that artists or people who have better sense and techniques of aesthetics are still valued.
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