I love low-fidelity prototyping – in particular I love the way it often provokes a conversation which wanders well away from the original topic under discussion. The beauty of low-fidelity prototyping is it allows the viewer to fill in all the missing bits from their own perspective – it gives a really personal account of what they would want, on how they are already visualising it. It allows the imagination to run free.

This came back to me whilst at a workshop last week with Daria Loi, Lucy Suchman and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino who were discussing design prototyping. The ethnography work from the UX group at Intel looked interesting – but it seemed to be as much about shaping future markets and selling utopian science fiction stories as it did about understanding social practices. There was much talk of the political economy at work here – big organisations can bring all the clout of the mass media and celebrities to the table. Does this really free the imagination? Or does it simply provide an unavoidable view of the future?

I’ve been looking at graffiti again for The world is your canvas project I’m working on with Kevin Smith – the idea is we’ll  design support for graffiti tagging (see TAKI 183) in the digital space – but you can only tag (and see tags) when you’re in the physical area through your mobile phone. They beauty of this is we get to play with tagging styles (fills, pieces, rollers, wildstyle…) and tagging practices (owning a black book, capping…) We’ll also get to see how we can re-interpret shared spaces and throw in new media types as well. Should be fun!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

A view of the future living in a consumer-based augmented reality. It’s all a bit Gibsonesque – but a thoughtful video nonetheless. I was reading Mark Weiser’s original ubiquitous computing paper last week – I do wonder just how technology deterministic it has turned out to be – it set a research agenda for 20 years. The real question is does evocative visions of the future free the imagination or place limits on it?