The Interaction Design students have had an exciting Rapid Prototyping workshop learning how to make prototypes quickly and easily. This is part of giving confidence to students to create for their projects using low-cost materials. It allows great freedom to be creative and get things made fast. From there, they can iterate their designs and improve them. Ultimately, these designs could be taken a lot further to a higher fidelity prototype.
The session introduces basic concepts on using foam board as a prototyping material. They created a simple lamp task in groups of 4. From there, they designed an item for a body part. Very low-tech and just foam board. In the following session, the groups built on these designs to make them fully working interactive prototypes. They used Arduino-based boards and components, different sensors, and outputs such as NeoPixels for their projects.
