Interaction design is about people, and a central concern is how to design for meaningful actions in use. To support this process, designers have developed a wide array of methods for supporting action and the involvement of stakeholders in the design process. A common element through many of these methods is the use of materialities in the design process.
These materialities are often referred to as prototypes, which have gained a renewed interest in early stage design methods over the last decade. One of the reasons for this renewed interest is that the types and complexity of problems that designers now tackle are expanding. Designers must represent interrelated services and environments as a holistic design solution, where they must visualize, evaluate, and communicate offerings which are to BE real but are NOT real yet. It seems that interweaving materialities in the design process serves as a way to encourage communication, provoke reflection and scaffold experience between numerous participants, all of whom must be part of a larger communication network in order to realize the larger vision.
Several researchers have thought about the different kinds of roles that materialities play in the design process, but what the field still lacks is a comparative understanding of the ways that materialities work across a number of different methods, for different objectives, and at different stages within a design process. There is a pre-dominant idea that prototyping has a converging character, and moving the materiality of prototyping to the fuzzy front end of the design process might seem contrasting since this design stage often has a diverging character. The automatic response is to revert to a representation method (wireframes, looks-like prototypes etc), wherein the prototypes serve as props for constructing narratives – either from the perspective of the designer and/or from the perspective of the user. The problem with this approach is that all the core design decisions within the design process have already been made, and as a result the prototype often does nothing to elicit new design ideas. Therefore we use the notion of materialities to expand the established character of prototyping.
Materialities play a central role in well-known research methods to open up a design space, such as mock-ups, cultural probes, technology probes, and context mapping, and emerging methods like for example the use of “provotypes” and the critical artifact methodology. Next to this, Buxton uses materialities to sketch within the design process through design methods like, paper models, flip books, acting with props, object play, hybrid photo/graphics, and wizard of oz.
Materiality plays a different role in all these methods, and is of benefit in the design process in different ways. They could be thought of the glue that connects different parts of the process together, bridge thoughts and people, stimulate narratives, and enabling learning through reflection.