Designer's DIY
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(by Sascha)
FTD today points towards the Stanford HCI Group who have developed a toolkit for designers of digital devices. D.tools enables product designers to try out the desired functionality themselves before handing it over to the engineers to have them cast all the nifty miniaturization-magic on the item. This they hope, will lead to products that are less flawed in terms of interface design since it's obviously very tedious and expensive to alter the position of a certain button when all the electronics have already been finalized. And - non miniaturized working stuff leads to very lovely oversized models of well-known gadgets. Figures above are cardboard mock-ups of digital camera and an iPod Shuffle! |
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This is old news Regine! =P
Just kidding ... happy you mentioned D.Tools.
Well, I must admit that I was most intrigued by the beauty of the pictures than by the project itself and wanted to share them. It's a bit like reverse growth, you start off big and clumsy and get smaller and smaller. In addition it also touches the eternal question of the interaction between designers and engineers.
Personally, I was recently struck by an experience: I was talking about networked objects to my friend who's a professional product designer and he couldn't grasp the matter *at all*. So I think that giving the people mostly concerned with usability and aesthetics access is a pretty important issue as technology gets more and more sophisticated.