Prototyping experience
The prototype is how you find out if you are asking right questions.
Not right in the analytical sense — you can analyze forever without knowing whether the design actually holds something true. Right in the felt sense: does this make something available that was not available before? Does it understand something about the situation?
A prototype is a question made inhabitable. Specific enough to be felt.
Open enough for the person inside it to bring their own meaning.
This is why our prototypes are always scenarios and situations rather than interfaces.
A person walking through a dark parking structure.
A driver behind a cyclist who wants to say I see you.
Someone in treatment who needs to feel held in another person's attention.
The scenario is the design. The prototype is the scenario made concrete.
The test is whether, inside it, you feel something true.
Experience prototype enable design team, users, and stakeholders to gain firsthand appreciation of existing or future conditions through behavioral scripts and active engagement.
Experience prototyping is less a set of techniques than it is an attitude and sensibility, inviting us to imagine possibilities of new relations that product or system can participate in.
Experience prototype is any kind of representation, in any medium, that is designed to understand, explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product, space or system we are designing.
Our prototyping sensibility is about probing new relations, making new organization of meaning tangible, inviting resonance, and expanding how people & technology can co-participate in experience.
