Hello, and welcome back. At this point, you should know a lot about Digital Low Fidelity Prototyping, and Paper Low Fidelity Prototyping, but what about Physical Prototyping? Physical usability matters too. And, computing nowadays doesn't have to happen just on a phone or a laptop. There are many examples, so for example, somebody could be trying to build a new device. Like the one I'm pointing to here, is an e-book reader for kids. You could be trying to invent something that's a wearable technology, like this Fitbit that I'm wearing right now. You could be trying to invent something that's a smart object. Like that is an example of a pacifier, that actually measures your child's temperature, and connects via Bluetooth to your phone, to tell you more about that. Or it could be something like a dedicated connected gadget, the example here is the Pokemon GO Plus. Which let's you catch Pokemon without actually having your phone open. And these are all examples of interfaces and interactive technologies. But Paper Prototyping alone, probably won't be enough for them. So how can you physically prototype? The classic example of this, is actually the Palm Pilot. Now, many of you might be too young to know about the Palm Pilot. But it was kind of the predecessor of all smart phones. So it was a small device that you could carry. That you could use to do things like plan your schedule, or take notes. And the CO who worked on the Palm Pilot, Jeff Hawkings actually carried around a wooden Palm Pilot, with a paper on it as the interface, for several months. And he just carried it in his pocket, and every time that he wanted to say, enter a meeting, he would take out his wooden, physical device with a piece of paper on it, and use a stylus to pretend to enter a meeting. So going through this process, actually communicated to him how big does the device need to be, in order to be comfortably carried everywhere he went. How long could you take to actually enter a particular, say appointment without it being awkward in the particular interaction? So having something physical that he was carrying, rather than just the piece of paper that he was interacting with, was actually really helpful to that design process. I've gone through this process as well. So when I took a class very similar to this class as an undergraduate at University of Maryland. We did a project in designing an e-book reader for the elderly. And this is, I'm old, so this was way before Kindle, so nothing like that was available yet. And one of the things we wanted to see was, whether an approach where you have a single page, so kind of the approach the Kindle has taken now, was better than the approach where you had two pages, and you opened it like a book. So we actually built physical prototypes out of cardboard, printed pages to put on them, and asked people in our demographic to interact with these, and give us feedback. So, it was really helpful to figure out what physical modality the system should have, just by actually watching somebody interact with it, and see what kind of challenges they had. Again, we wouldn't have been able to do this with just Paper Prototyping, it needed to have some sort of a physical component. Now there's lot's of resources you can use actually do this kind of prototyping. For example, you might have access to Rapid Prototyping facilities, such as a maker space. Then you can do cool things like, 3D print or laser-cut your prototype. Maybe the prototype that you want to build is actually something bigger, like a piece of furniture. What if you wanted to embed a screen inside a table? Then you can engage in something called IKEA hacking, and there's whole online communities dedicated to this. So with IKEA hacking, you take an existing cheap piece of furniture from IKEA, and then you add digital components to it, in order to have the features that you want it to have. Of course, you can prototype with Lego's. They are cheaper than 3D printing, and much more readily available, and you can make almost any shape you want. There's also hardware kits available, that can give you the same basic functionality that you may want to have, so something like a button, or a light. Woodworking, cardboard, sewing, all these skills that you learned maybe in middle school Home EC, or even in Kindergarten, can be helpful in making devices, that's physical prototypes that somebody can interact with. And of course, all of this can actually be combined with Paper Prototyping. So that you can add something like a paper screen, so to speak to your prototype. Let me give you some examples. So maybe I wanted to make a device that lets somebody, see if there's somebody nearby, whose in recovery, who needs help. And then they can see that person on a map. And they can decide whether they want to help, or not. And I decided that maybe I want to make it a dedicated device, because it's such an important issue in people's lives. So, maybe I think that the device should be kind of round in shape. So here I made a Lego shape that's kind of round. And I put a Post It on it, that represents the interface. So I can actually ask somebody to say, carry this in their pocket for the whole day. And maybe I can even ask them to periodically take it out and interact with it. Is it weird to tap this? Is this something they can keep kind of hidden, by keeping it on their hand like this? That could be a nice feature if you're talking about a device that's meant to be used by people who are in recovery. So this is an example. And yes, I did just give you permission to go out and buy a bunch of Lego's, if anybody questions that. Another example, I mentioned hardware kits, and a really good one is the Little Bits Kit. So this is a Little Bits Kit here. And let's say that, I wanted to prototype something like a bracelet, which would light up brighter and brighter, depending on how much effort somebody has recently been putting into their recovery. So every time they attend a meeting, or meditate, or call their sponsor, or work the steps, or any of these other activities that are part of a ongoing recovery maintenance, the light on their bracelet would get brighter. Now, I could actually create a Functional Prototype really simply, with the Little Bits Kits. These are just magnetic hardware kits so, you connect one to a battery. This is the power bit, you can turn it on. And then you can connect a few simple widgets to it. So in this case this Think Bit, is just the button. And I'm going to, instead of tracking automatically how much time somebody spends in recovery, because that would require a lot of work to do. I'm at this point just going to ask them to push the button every time they do. I also have this particular counter little bit, that will count up every time they push the button. So, I don't know if you can see it, but now it changing one, two, three, four, five. And, I'll also add a bright light on to it. Let me fish it out from my pocket here. So, this is an LED. And so, right now the light is not on, but as somebody engages in more, and more recovery activities, the light will slowly turn on, and get brighter, and brighter. So, of course, this is not a bracelet. This would not be easy easy for somebody to wear. But, you could kind of MacGyver some sort of a harness for their shoulder, which would carry the majority of this device, and then stretch the light out to their wrist like a bracelet. So it would let them kind of, consider what it would be like to wear a bracelet that the glow grows brighter as they engage in their recovery. And perhaps, they could let you figure out if this is a good idea, or a bad idea, based on their experience with this little simple cheap prototype. That you can build in, this took me, what 30 seconds maybe. So I definitely encourage these kinds of Functional Physical Prototypes as well. So thank you very much for joining, and I hope to see you in the next video.
