The use of material artefacts within the design process is a long-standing and continuing characteristic of interaction design. Established methods, such as prototyping, which have been widely adopted by educators and practitioners, are seeing renewed research interest and being reconsidered in light of the evolving needs of the field. Alongside this, the past decade has seen the introduction and adoption of a diverse range of novel design methods into interaction design, such as cultural probes, technology probes, context mapping, and provotypes.Yet, interaction design does not have a cohesive framework for understanding this diverse range of practices. Such a framework would assist practitioners in comparing and choosing between methods across the different stages, contexts and stakeholder relations within a design process. It seems that one fruitful place to start in addressing this lack is to focus in on the common characteristic that these practices share of materialities influencing the design process.
New technologies are bringing unexpected possibilities to improve our daily lives beyond the traditional focus of task efficiency and work environments. Some academics propose that these new technologies generate new types of interactions that go beyond a form of information processing and should be studied as a form of meaning making. This change encourages designers to evolve the role of traditional prototypes that have validated a concept at the final stages of a project to new approaches that use provocative prototypes-termed, "provotypes," that can be used at the beginning of design research to unveil hidden assumptions. We propose a structured way to study these phenomena using three subjective scales to measure interaction attributes represented as continua for time; from scarcity to abundance, space; intimate to public and information; tailored to generic. Three different projects in the fields of health, management and policy engagement are presented to validate the tool.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.