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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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To produce better computing systems, products, and services, we need a deeper understanding of how and why prototyping practices affect design results. My research empirically examines the creative process and design outcomes. I will describe experiments on iteration and comparison, two key principles for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our results also indicate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel—as opposed to serially—leads to more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. Most recently, we found that groups who produce and share multiple prototypes report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal information, share more features, and reach a better consensus.
Bio:Steven Dow is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the HCI Group at Stanford University where he researches human-computer interaction, creative problem-solving, prototyping practices, and "crowdsourcing" methods. He is co-recipient of a Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. He received an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa. http://www.stanford.edu/~spdow/
