PROCESSING AND DATA VISUALIZATION : The final week of experience prototyping had us being instructed by Karsten Schmidt. Karsten work is well documented in the london design scene.He shared his design philosophy along with his design pattern approach to object oriented programming. Karsten illustrated techniques on taking raw data and helping us to visualize it in new innovative ways to gain new insights into that information.The later part of the week had us participating in a Fritzing workshop on how to document our hardware sketches and fabricate and route our own circuit boards.

MULTI_TOUCH APPLICATIONS: This week we were introduced to multi-touch platforms. A recent UID graduate student and experience with Multi-touch platforms Ru Zarin demonstrated both hardware aspects and Flash development techniques to create Multi-touch applications. Here is a video diary of the progress and development I went though to build a Flash AS3 Multi-touch application.

MOBILE INTERACTIONS AND PLATFORM SETUPS: This week’s workshop had us looking into using mobile hardware to prototype and test our interactions. We spent the week familiarizing ourselves with how to setup the open source software environment and tap into the iphone and ipod touch’s hardware. The next step was to develop web applications in Apple’s Dashcode using javascript and CSS to control various hardware features of the iPhone. The final deliverable we had was to create a “Future Pet” in two days from concept to working interactive model. The process of how we worked through our “Future Pet” can be seen below in the posted vimeo link.

WORKING WITH PHIDGETS AND ARDUINO: Sketching in hardware is an indispensable tool for designers to articulate a product technology and experience without the need of engineering assistance. It can be an iterative quick process to let designers try new ideas in a fast flexible way, this in turn lets designers explore more scope and dig deeper to discover meaningful behavioural attributes a product should possess. The open source micro-controller(Arduino) along with open source programming languages like Processing have empowered designers with a set of hardware and software coding toolbox to help them envision their products and services.

STOP MOTION ANIMATION: Stop motion as a prototyping tool is an often overlooked method for interaction designers. It’s ability to be used to prototype tangible interfaces can be effective technique that serves as inspiration for the development of novel physical interfaces. Stop motion can also be used to discover the repercussions of technologies that have yet to prevail. Techniques like pixilation give designers the ability to illustrate or animate the body to express a fantastic idea or the expression of an emotion. In summary the use of stop motion animation can be used to produce quick low-fidelity prototypes of tangible interfaces, or can be used to refine a design and present an interaction scenario.