PART III WELCOME TO AALTO DESIGN FACTORY!
8.3 P UUHAMAA : S HOW ME YOUR BRAIN !
8.3.2 Central role of prototyping
One day, on the door of one Puuhamaa there was a post-it note that boldly stated: “Fast Prototype – Show me your brain”94. I pondered on its meaning and at the same time marveled how obvious it was and how well it fitted ADF. In fact, one of the students I talked to had noticed the same note.
“…someone had marked on the door of the Puuhamaa a post-it note that reads “fast prototype, show me your brain” and there are two guys showing each other their brains. Like I don’t know, to that somehow, like maybe through that I found that wait a minute, maybe that’s true, the point is that you have these cool ideas in your head, but putting them in words is often pretty difficult, so complex ideas.
But prototyping, in prototyping you bring the idea fast and you get fast feedback on it.”
Engineering student (SE2)
Picture 8: The door to the group work space Brainstorm
94 In 2014 I noticed that one of the spaces meant for group work was now named ”Brainstorm – Show Us Your Brain”
On 12.4.2011 I visited ADF with my son, who was five at the time. We spent time at Kafis, and as usual, post-it notes and pens were lying around. I had explained what ADF was and what people there do. !
!
Soon I found him drawing something. ! - What’s that? I asked. !
- It’s a new type of computer, I’m testing it, he said. !
!
He had just built a quick-and-dirty prototype.
The result was also posted on ADF’s Facebook – page, challenging ”what was your last quick-and-dirty prototype?”. !
I noticed very soon that all the ongoing course projects had produced many physical objects during the course. Product prototypes were the obvious manifestation, which culminate in their showcasing in events. But the objects were not all prototypes in a typical sense, but also visual materials such as flyers, posters, logos, web pages and other manifestations. I asked about this from the students and they saw it as one way of making them just “do” things – instead of only thinking about it in their heads, also signaling that things were moving forward, which further motivated them.
“…maybe it’s like encouraging to do something when usually no, usually you just read theories at least in “Kauppis” [Aalto Business School], so it’s really like, you don’t concretely do anything. Here you are encouraged to try, experiment in a way, you don’t think that even though it’s not gonna be perfect thing what you do, you can at least learn so much when you do and try out different things.”
Business student (SB1)
“…they are like a continuous sign that we are progressing, like we create a proto about something, like I think, like endless thinking is not good, like at some point you just need to do more, and then if things go wrong, then you do again…”
Engineering student (SE4)
This made the stated purpose of ADF as encouraging “experimental problem-based learning”
and learning-by-doing very concrete. Students also appreciated the fact that trying and failing was encouraged.
“I think this has been really encouraging, I remember right in the beginning that just try, doesn’t matter if you fail, this has not been said before. Or actually this is the only place someone has said things like that during my time at school.”
Business student (SB1)
There were also few a touch amused comments that at times the need for prototyping and creating something tangible went a bit too far. One student reminisces laughing on some instances where the prototyping veered towards the bizarre:
”…but somethimes I like feel that a bit too much they just say that ’cross borders and be stupid’ and then build a thing from legos and say that its like a new nuclear powerplant that uses bananapeels for energy…soi t goes a bit like ’let’s be propeller-heads’…”
Engineering student (SE1)
Students experienced the prototypes with multiple senses. Prototyping involves the not only the sight, but senses of touch, even smell and taste. I was having a cup of coffee at Kafis one day, and an engineering student came by, holding in his hands some metal construction. I asked what it was, and he said it was nothing in particular, but it had a certain strength that he wanted to “feel”. He continued that when you do strength calculations it really helps to then hold some piece that in fact has that certain strength, to gain a rule of thumb, so to speak. The same issue came up again in an interview with another student.
“Yeah it’s that you can do things. I mean do something, I have talked about this quite a lot with my friends who have been working for example at building sites, that they have like a physics class or something…that when they, they have a calculation or principle or else, that when you really take some example really into your hands…so you can really try it, because it does so much more, you understand it so much better…Like I have a friend studying heating and plumbing, he frets that really he doesn’t understand anything…he understands in theory but then goes like to watch someplace, he doesn’t know which pipe is which…like you just don’t get it…So if you could more really hold the thing in your hands, it would be so much better already.”
Design student (SD6)
Picture 9: Doing with your hands (Source: ADF Flickr)
The act of physical doing was also referred to as being relaxing and helping in team building.
“…in a way it [the prototype] it was quite useless in itself, but I thought it was a really big team building event...[…]… it sort of made things easier, kinda, like ‘yeah, we are really doing something’.
Yeah that could be it, it was kinda relaxing even, that we got to do something with our hands and stuff.”
Engineering student (SE6)
“In this sense the prototype is not just that this is now the model from which we do the final product, it’s more like a tool for thinking and a physical thing, of which we can talk of and directs our attention and you find stuff. Ergonomics, person’s dimensions and stuff are pretty hard to think in abstract, like is this lever 20 cm or 30 cm in length. So there, you have the actual lever and you wave it about and then a bigger guy comes along to wave it, then you notice those things.”
Engineering student (SE5)
“Like every time we have built something, it’s been fun and maybe uplifting to the team spirit. That sitting around in small spaces like this and talking, not moving or doing anything, it’s kind of paralyzing”.
Design student (SD3)
The building of the prototypes together also meant that students who had never done anything similar before were suddenly learning how to use different tools and thus participating in practices that were potentially more familiar to others95.
“…it is exactly that getting out of the comfort zone. It was fun to notice that like T who totally is not the type of person to build things and stuff, but then after Christmas we were doing a proto and I told him a bit what to do, so then he happily worked the planing machine, the sawdust just flew around and so on… and it was really great to notice that people are not like ‘I don’t want to touch those’ but all are really involved together.”
Engineering student (SE13)
The prototypes also acted as a bridge between the different project teams, as students from other projects tested the prototypes of others and gave feedback on their prototype. There was, for example, a car parked in front of ADF once, where anyone could test a new product that was installed within by the students. I think I tested at least ten different prototypes during my stay. It seemed a good way to get people engaged and interested over project boundaries.
95 Interestingly one machine shop staff member told me how there were quite clear cultural differences. Foreign students especially from Asia had often never held any tools in their hand, or even seen someone use them, whereas Finnish students had been exposed to doing for example wood work at school, at their summer cottages etc. In this sense, prototype building was not as ”alien” to most Finnish students as potentially students from other cultures.
Here students test a headrest to be used in dentistry x-ray. The project timed the process of x-raying and studied how much the head moved, if the
“patient” was comfortable etc.
Picture 10: Testing of prototypes
Acting was one way of using all the senses in prototyping, and there was one engaging story I was told of how one PDP-group acted what they were going to do in the PDP Christmas Gala.
I recount it below in its entirety, as it finely illustrates many things I observed at ADF: the applying of prototyping also to service concepts, engaging the whole embodied participant in the process, the creative way the group dramatized the service context of their product – and not least, the amount of fun that was evident the group had in the process!
Acting the prototype - as told by a student
“So we came to the conclusion, that in fact the concrete part of our project is not the device, because if we did a proto if the device, like we did, it’s a lump of modelling clay.
Really what we do is a service, because our device is designed for a very specific purpose and specific use cases, what it really does. How we do it, and what we do with it, it’s in fact more a service concept. And in fact our proto for the PD6 (Christmas gala) was a play.
We did the modelling clay phone, but we just briefly showed it, and it was a bit like a toy.
But we did a play, which started from the catastrophe area workers (relief workers) are in their way and something happens. The guys drive around. There was a thing where we had like few chairs and bits. Then there is an earthquake or something lie that, and the tire of the ambulance goes flat, and people start having all kinds of problems: I have this problem, I have that problem. In the beginning some had these construction helmets on and they were the helpers – they were all confused and always in the wrong place. If you had a broken leg, the helper was “hey sorry, I’m a mechanic” and then the flat tire, “no I’m the doctor” and all that.
Then we showed the second part, where our device comes to the stage – which at this point of our great play was a coffee mug with strings attached, our fancy ad hoc network! We had the idea with the stringed cuos, that more cups, and a big circle, and all the strings all tied up in there. The network comes around them.
Then they all start to communicate, and we had question marks on post-its on the helmets.
Then you took away the post-it, and beneath there were red crosses, wrenches and stuff.
You identified who is who, and they found their right place. That was kind of the thing, like what we bring is a certain degree of organizing and big picture to the chaos. That you know where what resources are and what they do, and if you suddenly need something – you may be fixing the cars or a hospital an you fall off the ladder you need suddenly a doctor, then you need suddenly some completely different expertise.
I don’t know if anyone liked it, well it was like so much fun. It lead to the point, where we planned it for way too long, then we had half an hour left, We practiced it like three-four times. We had thought about so long that everyone knew the basic plot, but every time we acted it, it went totally different way! We laughed so hard.
It was so much fun, like it went always, always different and everyone talked like different stuff. But you saw that it was to go perfect! At some point someone was like all the time with a broken leg, and then someone comes and starts to fix the arm! The other guy is like
“hey it’s my leg that hurts” but the doctor is all “no no, it’s your arm, you are just delusional. I’m a doctor, I know it’s your arm, really”.
Engineering student (SE9)
Another way of using objects was the role given to visualizations and drawings.
Picture 11: A drawing on the door of Stage
“Yeah I think that the ability to draw is really key, you can visualize ideas quickly, and make others convinced that hey this works, my drawings have been often the sort of talking point of our meeting or meeting around it has organized the meeting”
Design student (SE1)
Also coming up with names and visual identity for the project groups right at the start of the collaboration was seen – when reflected - as being very useful and acting as an invisible guiding hand of sorts96.
“For example the flyer, it was supposed to, in order to be able to do it, we had to first think ok, what is this thing in the end all about. We can’t know what the final product is, and still we had to do the flyer and visualize the fundamental thing…the names in particular were good, maybe a sort of a good invisible hand”
Engineering student (SE2)
“Yeah it brings the team together. So it does, it is the point of the visual design is just that. Well that, and the fact that then from the outside you can see that we are doing something, that we have a project going on. So that, almost my view, is that the main function is that it brings together and connects.”
Design student (SD3)
96 The project manager in question noted also that ”I don’t know how minutely the course staff have calculated that it works like this, or is it more like a gut feeling that it might be a good thing…” This points to the explicit management of interdisciplinary collaboration and prototyping, to which I will return to once we visit the Staff Wing.
Picture 12: Flyers from the 2011 PDP projects
However, there were observed limitations to this centrality of prototyping. Some groups I observed had such abstract problems at hand that prototyping a concrete object was experienced quite difficult.
“…like the nature is that we revolve around quite abstract issues, like doing of concrete models or experiments or the like is already due to practical reasons pretty impossible.”
Engineering student (SE3)
In these groups a sense of frustration was palpable, as the product gala neared and the pressure to “show” something was increasing. All groups in the end however had a stand up and running in the Gala, and something tangible to show. In some cases it was concrete product such as a campus bike or a new type of headrest for dentistry (shown below) – and in few cases a very visual collection of design drawings.
Picture 13: Final prototypes (and their evolution) on show at the 2011 PDP Gala
All of the above ways of engaging in prototyping and visualizations made it possible to
“break the illusion of unity”, that is the assumption that everyone understands for example the goal of the project the same way, as well as making explicit the open issues that still needed to be resolved.
”…So what happens is was that we had thrown about ideas about what all we coud have here, and then it sort of created an illusion that ok, we have kinda a clear picture of what is this idea of ours and the product. And then once we started, Ok it was prototyping what we did, two things came out. First we all had had different ideas of what it was supposed to be. We had that illusion that the picture everyone had themselves was the same as the common one. And then on the other hand, the desicions we had not made, the fact that they were not made, were kind of made explicit and forces us to make the decisions of those things.”
Design student (SD5)
In the end, it seemed that already the possibility of building something – quick, easy and no questions asked – that was a motivator already in itself. ”Like if we have an idea, and think ’it would be nice to do a proto on this’, we can just say ’ok, let’s go downstairs and do it!”