Thoughts on Schrage
Sadly I couldn't attend to the two lectures Experience Prototyping and User Testing due to sickness. I have done my furthest to catch up from home, reading through what has been posted on canvas such as slides and exercises. I have also made sure to read all the literature associated to these lectures.
Reading about the purpose and practice of serious play brought me insights of how play can give valuable information and bring forth hidden opportunities. The chapter also challenged my prejudices about play being the opposite to serious. I feel enlightened by reading how playful prototypes act as “...a tool for discovery, insight and test” (s.19, 2013).
I find it interesting how Schrage writes about the bond between hypothesis and prototype. He means that there has to be a hypothesis to be tested for a prototype to be a prototype. He means that you craft a hypothesis by crafting a prototype, no matter the medium you craft it in (s.22, 2013). I feel enlightened by this too, and will consider it into my further prototypes. Drawing from my latest prototypes - texting, video-mailing and voice-messaging friends and family I definitely feel like we did what we did to craft a hypothesis. We needed to test how these ways of communicating were interpreted by friends and family, and to see the difference between the different ways.
Schrage means that prototypes that encourages serious play often leads to ground-breaking discoveries, like the radar and steam engines (s.20, 2013). I could be wrong, but I interpret his chapter to mean that prototypes which encourages serious play are interactive prototypes. Prototypes that need the tester/user to interact (play) with it to be understood and to gain new insights from it. It’s from experience that we often draw conclusions.
Although, Schrage has some points of calling it “play” instead of interactive prototypes. He mentions that “...’play’ represents a surreal, unreal or ‘not quite’ reality” (s.25, 2013) and means that the freedom that comes with seeing ‘beyond’ the reality is a powerful way to gain insights and to shape a new reality. While just interacting with a prototype might just spawn ideas of the present - playing with a prototype might spawn ideas of a potential future. He writes that “...uncertainty is essential to successful play” and I think this a major point that we often miss when interacting with a prototype. I believe that we, as humans, often are very good at finding connections and are very bad at living in uncertainty. I believe that that's a factor for us to often miss out on novel and new-thinking ideas and opportunities - because we’re too scared of the uncertainty. Will it work? How? When? etc. These questions are important, but maybe not until we’ve explored uncertainty the way it deserves to be explored.
“...prototypes emerge from replicable and repeatable innovation processes” (s.23, 2013). I feel like I haven't gotten to this stage of prototyping just yet. We touched upon it in Workshop 3.1 and 3.2, but we only iterated on the prototype twice that round. I’m looking forward into getting more experience of iterative prototyping and doing multiple prototypes for the ‘same’ cause of to explore the same concept. I will have this quote in mind when working together with my new group in Project 2.
