Methodology – Lecture

Today’s lecture was based on the methods we are supposed to work with while working on a project. This should help with questions like what are we supposed to do and how are we supposed to do methodology wise.

The second module when exploring we should be interaction driven. The knowledge should be gained by exploring different interaction possibilities.

The process of one project should be in somewhat the following steps:

• Tinker – Play with technology
  • Playing with the code to explore and understand the code itself and the material. Rather than using it as an ideation session this is to be granted better understanding and base.
• Ideation/Sketch
  • Brainstorming and sketching ideas on paper can help with opening up the possibilities to be more creative. Usually sketching is being used since it can be fast and inexpensive when ideating. It allows exploration.
• Implement
  • This is the technical part of the project. In this stage we implement our ideas to the code and work with it to create a working experiment.
• Reflect/Experience
  • In the last stage we should reflect on the experience and knowledge we gained from the experiment and how it can be improved in the next iteration. We should keep iterating on the experiment, since it might be a failed one, but we can get that as a learning experience.

Sketching is a another method we should use while working on a project. The drawing can be used as an experiment that can be used for discovering and exploring. Sketching can also be seen as a process or as a product. We can sketch revise it and throw it away if we do not see it working. It is a cheap way of presenting and trying things out. It is quick and usually big time saver.

While sketching on a paper is a very quick, sketching with code can be more time consuming. Proficient knowledge in coding is also needed to create more expressive sketches rather than using paper. It can also be understood more as implementation. We usually ask ourselves questions such as would this work if i change this? How would it react if I add new function? How would it look like?

It can be said that when we sketch we present concepts rather than implementation.