Since I’ve been remiss with a definition of Interaction Design, here’s the Wikipedia to cover my oversight. And it just so happens that Interaction Design Institute Ivrea is part of the definition. Cool!
On Saturday Technogym came to visit the school. Technogym is the second-largest gym-equipment manufacturer in the world, which is a pretty big deal in Italy since they’re an Italian company. The average age in the company is 29. The cool thing was that the CEO and several directors of the company showed up on a Saturday morning at 8:30AM to see our projects and learn more about the school. Their home base is about a five hour drive away, so they arrived on Friday evening and stayed the night in Ivrea.
After showing them around the school and introducing them to some of the projects we’ve done here at IDII, several faculty lead them into a classroom where we were ready to show them three of the service design projects from last semester. I was in one of the groups that presented, and after the last group finished there was a long conversation in Italian spoken at high speed. I didn’t catch everything that was said, but later I learned that the CEO was describing to everyone else what an experience prototype is. Which was really cool because we hadn’t really explained the concept in depth and hadn’t talked about the benefits of it. But he got it!
Simply put, experience prototyping is a way to prototype a service experience. Because services take place over time and through a variety of touchpoints both human and object, and generally tend to involve intangible, qualitative aspects, they require prototyping in a way that’s different from how objects or spaces can be prototyped through, for example, models. Experience prototypes can be documented through video, but they are not video prototypes. Video prototypes are where things are made to appear to work a certain way in post-production. Rather, experience prototypes attempt to create a situation in which people behave and interact as if the service already exists. The interaction designer then looks for user insights into how the service performed as a way of grounding design decisions.
Experience prototypes are very new tools, developed only in the last couple of years, and the methodologies and body of work behind them is limited. Which is exciting for me because it means you get to discover and make the rules as you implement an experience prototype. live|work is pretty much the leading company in service design and experience prototypes, and they came to work with us during the service design project. Experience prototypes were definitely a hard sell to me, because I’ve always been taught to look at the quantitative information: 50% of people do X. But the reality is that sometimes looking at extreme cases, or designing for a specific person, can have far-reaching benefits. The best example I’ve heard so far involved the design of buses.
If you design a bus for the middle 50% of the people, as market research would tend to encourage, you will end up with one kind of bus. However, if you look at an extreme of the bell curve and design for someone who is in a wheelchair, for example, you will end up with a completely different design. However, the design for the person in a wheelchair will most likely be more convenient for everyone, not just the person in the wheelchair. I encountered this phenomenon myself in California, where the buses have low floors that are curb-height, and the interior is laid out in a more intelligent and spacious way. In other words, it was good design that benefited everyone.
This presentation wasn’t about selling a particular project, but promoting the way our school practices design. So we were really showing off the design capabilities, methodologies, and types of results the school produces. We’ll see what they think, and if they’re interested in working with us at a later date, but at the very least it was neat to have them visit us. Here’s a quick photo of them looking at one of the exhibits set up downstairs.
This past week was Salone di Mobile, the largest annual furniture show in Europe. The IDII exhibit in the Tecno space went very well. It’s interesting to see all the companies that are coming through the school these days, because a large number of them found out about the school at last year’s Salone. So it takes a while for them to make it here, but they’re definitely showing up! Technogym is an exception to this, but Frog was here a couple of weeks ago, and I believe they checked out the exhibits last year.I was also at the San Siro event on Thursday. The second-years presented some of their work, and there were a bunch of other groups and people who took over the stadium with their work, including Matthew Barney. I didn’t hang around for long, but it was probably just like any of the other parties that spread out within Milan during Salone.
Let’s see…and today we started the Mattel project, in which we design toys and games for the next four weeks. Should be fun! It’s been a while since I’ve been in the head-space of a 3 to 10-year-old, so I’m definitely getting a bit of a brain workout trying to relate to them.
Otherwise, I’m trying to finish up my portfolio. School projects are done, and I’m almost done with my past work. It will hopefully be completely online by Wednesday. Anyways, I’d better get some dinner and then cracking on it.
And yes, I will get to the rest of the trip photos just as soon as I finish my portfolio obligations.
