homework day 4 – dora

Write shortly about your previous experiences communicating ideas and prototyping if you have any. Compare the crafting method you have used in the past to prototype and what you learned today. How do you think that these digital fabrication methods can help you for your future projects?

I’ve only done prototyping the old fashioned way before: with cardboard, paper, tape and scissors. The advantage to this is that I can fully understand what part of the prototype works and does not work since I handmade the product. However, with 3d printing, the prototype will be much more accurate in size and in proportions and will have a much better appearance (without tape sticking out). This would help a lot because then people other than the maker of the handmade prototype would be able to review the product with more scrutiny and it looks a lot more professional as well. Also, hand-prototyping takes a longer time (for the producer to create) and a lot more accidents happen e.g. the materials break so digital prototyping is a lot more efficient. 

Read The art of interaction. Based on your reflections on the reading, define in your own words what interaction is for you.

Interaction – Interchange of things such as actions and speech between two or more people or objects to stimulate engagement (and sometimes to find patterns). Different forms of interaction can include direct (in which one object directly does something to the other and the other responds), facilitated (in which the interaction is monitored or one sided), and ambient (in which one participant’s movement can be detected by another and performs a single, already programmed action to that).

Finally, explain what contributes to a successful interactive experience based on your definition of interaction.

I think a successful interactive experience would be one that uses the most appropriate form of interaction to keep both participants engaged for the amount of time the creator/the participants wanted. The point of interaction is to stimulate interest and thus engagement, so a successful interaction would be to keep the engagement. Since there are many different forms of interaction, the length of appropriate engagement would be varied but as long as it is the amount of time the creator wanted, it could be classified as successful.