Chapter 11: Design, Prototyping and Construction
Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | Assignment Comments | Teaching Materials
www.baddesigns.com
This site shows a set of bad designs for 'interactive' products, from filing cabinets to coffee machines, from car panels to traffic lights, and explains why they are bad. You might like to look at them yourself first and see what you think of them. The site is quite old now, but is no less interesting for that.
http://www.usability.gov/
This well-designed website contains a range of methods, tools and basic explanations to support a wide range of interaction design activities. It specifically identifies the public sector as its main audience, but the resources here are just as relevant to other sectors.
The page on prototyping http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/prototyping.html is particularly pertinent to this chapter.
www.billbuxton.com
Bill Buxton's home page contains a lot of links that are relevant to designing and sketching user experiences. I found the videos of his talks particularly interesting and useful, but there are many other resources linked from here as well.
instructables.com is a community website all about the wild and whacky world of making. It is not restricted to interactive products, but includes areas such as jewelry, 3D printing, solar energy, up-cycling and reuse, robotics, and cooking. The site gives access to tools, ideas, instructions and products. http://makezine.com/ is a similar website for sharing ideas, products and tools, while http://www.arduino.cc/ contains news and updates for the arduino toolkit.