Prototyping Study
Process Documentation
Interaction Scenarios
Platform Description

Layout Variations

Structural System

System Components

Taxonomy of Interaction
Prototype Team

Make to know
The ‘Make to Know’ principle is an essential heuristic technique underpinning prototyping intent enabling designers to observe, experience and better understand how the ideas, products, interactions and contexts they envision will stimulate, enable and enhance performance or behaviors intended. Engaging users in activities and experiences moves beyond verbal description to actually performing actions where behaviors observed become evidence used to guide insight generation, criteria development and concept evolution.

Prototyping Study

General Goals
The project goal is to develop an integrated physical structure, based on a product system, with multiple possible configurations, that can support physical-virtual interplay, social interaction and co-construction activities for kids within different library settings. These activities, existent or to be developed by others, will change over time, and their development is not part of the core goals of this project. However, in order to demonstrate the affordances of ThinkeringSpace environments for supporting specific interactions, example activities are being developed to enable prototype observation.

Neighborhood Access
Prototyping ThinkeringSpace environments in libraries is desirable to understand how kids, parents, library staff and others will engage with the physical space. Although envisioned as architecturally independent, they will be functionally integrated through space and location, users interaction and internal operation protocols. Because the design focus in this phase of the project includes spatial, technological and informational affordances, observing and understanding how ThinkeringSpaces will support multiple experience and interaction opportunities for kids is key.

Having access to kids from a neighborhood who use the library represents the best case scenario for prototyping. Because the opportunity to observe kids actually working in an environment will be close to reality, it is believed that the quality of the interaction and subsequent feedback will be informative.

Flexible Prototyping Platform
A prototyping platform is an open system that anticipates change and facilitates adaptation of structure, technology and information. Ease and speed of adaptation will effectively lower the time and cost thresholds on converting observed behaviors into criteria for next iterations. Changes can occur, within a situation of immediate feedback, where kids are participating with design researchers.

The intent is to create and build a physical, prototyping framework that will both simulate or approximate a realistic environment as well as enable a variety of interaction scenarios to be integrated into the framework and process. These scenarios will utilize activity areas or nodes that enable kids to explore, experiment, reflect and share naturally as they navigate spatially, functionally, socially or in terms of their interactions.

Activity nodes will be interchangeable, based on size, location, proximity or intent. Within the prototyping structure, there are some common affordances that will be useful in a variety of node experiments. For example, a large, interactive screen may be common to multiple activity nodes.

Other criteria shaping activity node design configurations or relationships include: working alone, working in collaboration, co-constructing something and sharing in one-to-many and many-to-many situations. For example, a single kid might choose to build an animated story at an animation node or two kids might co-create a story at a story creation node.