User Designer

How can we help people easily create and explore the design space around physical / virtual objects? I’ve touched upon this before when I wrote about physical objects that are designed to be easy to re-shape by physical manipulation, e.g. Snap Cups and Shape A Seat, aka Don’t Forget Me, etc.

With that question in mind have a look at this video showing off Magic Paper. Ain’t it cool! The researchers behind Magic Paper created a tool that tries to simplify the process of creating an interactive physical “thing”. With Magic Paper you create a virtual mechanical system by simply sketching it. You don’t have to spend ages creating 3d CAD drawings of a car, you don’t have to program complex models of gravity and other forces, etc. You could imagine an extended version of Magic Paper where when you’re happy with how your sketch behaves it is automatically built as a real-world object.

What excites me about Magic Paper is that anyone can (reasonably) easily create a very complicated physical mechanical system. You can create it by drawing, which we can all do - some better than others. You don’t have to worry about complex programming or physical modeling because Magic Paper has a lot of in-built smarts. The complexity of building a physical object / system is hidden, with the trade off that there are limits to what you can create.

Magic Paper is freely available for download, enjoy.

James Landay’s DENIM is a great example of another sketching tool. Over the years Dr. Landay has contributed a lot to sketch research, for example early in his research career Brad Myers and himself published Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design. With DENIM (download) you sketch out websites. Your sketches are interactive - for example you can draw links between web pages, sketch a website button that really works, etc. Try out this example of a DENIM created website. The website sketch is crude but its a good way of creating a sense of what the website would be like to navigate.

Magic Paper and DENIM are powerful examples of enabling people to build by building on what they can already do, i.e. draw. Sketching to create prototype designs potentially enables a tight feedback loop, i.e. draw, test, tweak, understand, repeat. Sketching also ties into an attempt to make designing, interacting and building “natural”. I’ll come back to natural / reality-based / haptic interaction in the next few weeks.

One potential issue with sketching interactive “things” is the fidelity of the sketch. How realistic is the interactive sketch? If its a low-fidelity sketch then the sketch (no matter how interactive) won’t be very like the end product, though it should still help you think about the end artifact in the early stages of designing and creating. There are also medium and high-fidelity prototyping approaches, where high-fidelity prototyping often involves building versions that are much closer to the finished design.

How does this tie into Snap Cups & How To Make (almost) Anything? With sketching we potentially have a way of enabling people to shape interactive objects to their needs without requiring considerable technical know how. For example sketch out how your clothes transform shape over time, how your door opens, what trails the “Follow Me” robot ant overlords take, etc.

Three final examples: Teddy and Smooth Teddy are brilliant examples of research into tools and approaches for simply drawing and creating 3d models. Line Rider is a dangerously addictive game that involves fun sketching to control a little you in a virtual physical world.