Tangible Mock-Up - used as design tool.

Through three case studies, tangible mock-ups were used as an interactive design tool for making a small scale representation of a topic. Three different levels of abstracttion were used. The purpose was to see which abstraction level that worked best for the participants, using creativity, non-verbal communication and the meeting take-away as indicators.
With a high abstraction level, in case study 1, a Value Chart/Model of a company and its relations to the out-side world were mapped - with success. In case study 2, a tangible mock-up of a PCB for an electronics product was tried out. The paper suggests that tangible mock-ups work. It is good as a story telling tool and the participants take away from the meeting is equal to or better than using a traditional approach.
A tight link between a real life component and a representative item in the tangible mock-up seems to reduce the creativity of the participants.
The higher the level of abstraction is, the more non-verbal the communication gets.
This is a MCI ITPD SDU 1st year student study, presented April 2009 at the CIDeR conference in Eindhoven

Category:

Education

Tags:

• CIDeR
• iMovie
• ITPD
• mci
• mock
• sdu
• spire
• tangible
• ups