Prototyping Q&A with Katherine Isbister
This extended question-and-answer content comes from an on-going experiment I started while writing a recent book about prototyping as part of the Stanford d.school Design Guides series. That experiment involved asking the same specific questions about prototyping of people I know or know of, admire, wondered about, and otherwise respect. Both then and now I’m trying to understand what prototypes and prototyping mean to design professionals and a wider orbit of people beyond the practice.
A few notes about Katherine:
Katherine Isbister describes herself professionally as a human computer interaction and games researcher who creates and studies digital games and other playful computer-supported experiences. I was privileged to meet her at the moment when she was founding the Game Innovation Lab at NYU’s School of Engineering. It was a fledging space + concept that in an unprecedented way was putting people (including student people!) into the context of game development in a physical and digital space. Katherine has since moved her work to California where she is a professor in the Department of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. Her book, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design, offers excellent provocations through gaming that translate into broader design principles & mechanics; students dig it. I am grateful to Katherine for sharing her perspectives through the lens of gaming and beyond.
“Prototype” has a literal definition and has lots of implications — what do you think it communicates well? Where is it a total miss?
Katherine Isbister: I think the word captures the fluid and provisional nature of what we make when we make prototypes. But it doesn’t capture the questions we’re trying to get at when we build something to put in front of another human in order to learn what might be good to do next. I think the word really misses the connection between the senses, reasoning, and emotions of the person trying the prototype out, and what happens next with the designer(s).
But I think we have a general bias in our ways of talking about what we are doing of focusing on the objects rather than the process — I don’t have a better word to offer up that is in common use… what I wish it conveyed better was ‘here’s a thing I made to get your insights about what I should design next, I particularly care about these bits of it can you respond to those for sure?’
How does prototyping show up differently in your personal versus professional life? (… or your recreational life or experimental life?)
KI: Such an interesting question, I’m realizing I may not prototype all that much in my personal/recreational life. I tend to just ‘do’ stuff — maybe I prototype too much at work so I avoid it at home? I do iterate a lot — for example, switching which kayak I have based on the conditions I’ve realized I like to paddle in locally, from a heavy long sea kayak to a surf ski that’s lighter weight and very maneuverable. Or, trying out different leisure-time singing groups to find the right level of effort and the repertoire I enjoy singing. Maybe in my personal life it’s more about me interfacing with existing materials and environments and groups of people to find a good fit? So, iterating rather than prototyping per se…
Thinking of a recent project in which intentionally you used a prototype — whether a challenge or a breeze — what were ways you knew if the prototype was going well or poorly?
KI: A key factor in our prototyping in my research group is that the materials shouldn’t become too burdensome or fussy — you have to be able to use them in a ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand way. We will fall back another step away from the technology to some simpler means if we get too tangled up in trying to make particular features work and don’t make good prototyping headway.
A corollary is if someone gets too enamored with certain features of a technology as such, and loses sight of the through-lines of the ‘why’ of the prototype, then we need to redirect, to make sure we haven’t lost the internal compass of the project’s design ideas. It’s ok if we end up with some really interesting new direction that still resonates with the core design values, though — those surprises can be great. The key is to use the resistance of the materials to learn things that you can use (instead of letting the materials shape your ideas right out of existence).
What’s a go-to prototyping tool you use most regularly? (Please feel easy interpreting “tool” loosely — object, state of mind, constraint, whatever…)
KI: My research team members and collaborators are big fans of bodystorming — whether in real life or in XR spaces (for our current social VR work we’ve been playing around with ways to bodystorm that work well in these environments).
What’s missing from the discussion of prototyping?
KI: I would love to see a whole book of annotated examples of prototypes — I love Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences — it has so many interesting examples that illustrate the points he’s making about provisional manifestations of design ideas along the way to a final product. I wish we had a forum for sharing lots of these as learning tools for all of us. More annotated prototype artifacts I guess, is what I’m craving.
What’s a change in how you think of prototyping *now* contrasted to how you may have thought/acted in the past?
KI: I used to think of them as paper early in my career, and now there are so many digital tools for both creating and sharing prototypes. That has really changed. I think with the rise of service design and ever-changing interfaces and experiences that rely on user data and algorithms, in some sense, the final products now have a provisionality that didn’t used to be the case, which has profound implications for the act of design. In some sense, these services are forever prototype-ish, subject to change based on the response of the people who use them.
Learn more about Katherine’s work at UC Santa Cruz, including the Center for Computational Experience and Social Emotional Technology Lab.
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Buy the book, This Is a Prototype, here and check out the Stanford d.school Design Guides series here.
