Prototyping Inconvenience: A pedagogical experiment on designing for debate in design education

Abstract

With design having more impact than ever, there is an increased need for critical inquiries into design research and education that engage designers to question established disciplinary assumptions. One prevailing myth is the convenience ideal: the obsession with comfort, efficiency, smoothness, and smartness that relates to a trend of envisioning super-convenient futures. By combining iterative prototyping, anti-solutionist strategies, and tactics of critical and speculative design, we built a counter-approach to conventional design processes: Inconvenient Design. With convenience as the topic for debate, we explored its potential in the course Stranger Things–Prototyping Inconvenience. This paper provides an overview of the approach and course format, using examples of student projects to illustrate how it encouraged them to reflect and debate directly in the design process in a tangible way, enabling them to craft alternatives. Lastly, we discuss the opportunities our methodological approach can bring to design research and education.

Dissolving distances: Designing close-to-body experiences for remote settings

“…It is about the process of designing artifacts rather than interacting with finished -but intentionally unfinished-looking -artifacts. This speculation, through the making of rapid visual and physical prototypes, not only stimulates the imagination of participants but can also expose deeper personal desires or fears (Andersen & Wakkary, 2019;Tost et al, 2022).…”

“…Figure 11 Blended prototyping is a tool to translate paper prototypes (left: Bähr et al, 2010) to experienceable clickdummies to foster quick iteration (right: Bähr, 2012) That the limiting factor of the material is an advantage of lo-fi prototypes seems to be generally accepted (Tost et al, 2022;Frye, 2017). Khan and Matthews (2019) observed this in the context of participatory design: "The shape limitations forced participants to think of ways to share their ideas by relying only on rigid structures to help articulate their thoughts and ideas, and in doing so became more expressive".…”