Postgraduate Course: Experience Prototyping (fusion on-site) (EFIE11412)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | In this hands-on course, students will gain hands-on experience of rapid prototyping to explore, evaluate and communicate future services, concepts and experience. The course will introduce range of accessible tools and methods to create simple prototypes, alongside approaches to deploy, share and reflect upon prototypes and service experiences with end-users and stakeholders. The course requires no prior design knowledge or making, and will follow a dynamic, design sprint model in response to a real-world challenge. |
| Course description |
Prototyping is an essential part of any design process to explore, evaluate and communicate how people might respond to and experience a new product or service. Low-fidelity prototypes can take many forms, however key to their success is being able to clearly identify the purpose of any prototype, and how to present and evaluate this with different end-users.
This course will provide students from any background a core grounding in the value of prototyping, and approaches to develop and test prototypes and service experiences. The intensive days will follow design sprint methodologies, and see students working in small interdisciplinary teams to respond to a real-world challenge. Students will be introduced to a range of accessible tools and methods for rapid prototyping, and supported by the teaching team and EFI Makerspace to develop initial ideas and concepts into a tangible prototype or service experience to test and showcase with their peers.
By the end of the course, students should have a clear understanding of the value and accessibility of many prototyping tools and approaches, and be well placed to go on and independently develop further practical and technical skills to make prototypes should they wish.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - On-Site Fusion Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. This approach (our 'fusion' teaching model) offers students flexible and inclusive ways to study, and the ability to choose whether to be on-campus or online at the level of the individual course. It also opens up ways for diverse groups of students to study together regardless of geographical location. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities.
Students should be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- Unless the lecturer or tutor indicates otherwise you should assume the session is being recorded.
As part of your course, you will need access to a personal computing device. Unless otherwise stated activities will be web browser based and as a minimum we recommend a device with a physical keyboard and screen that can access the internet.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 20 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
100
(
Lecture Hours 2,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 12,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
84 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Summative Assessment:
The assessment is in two related parts: a group assessment based on documenting and reflecting upon prototyping activities undertaken throughout the course, followed by a critical individual reflective essay.
1) Group Slide Deck (25%)
(25-page slide deck, pdf)
Working in groups students will be asked to produce a detailed slide deck (up to 25 pages) documenting the outcomes of prototyping methods and testing undertaken during the intensive days in response to a specific brief.
Groups will be formed in Week 2, with care taken to ensure online and asynchronous students are supported to participate equitably in all group work.
2) 1000 Word Individual Reflective Essay (75%)
Building on the group work undertaken during the intensive days, students will be asked to individually reflect on the limitations of their initial prototype and testing, and to describe how they would seek to further iterate and develop their prototype given more time, resources and a wider audience. |
| Feedback |
Feedback on the formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The course organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment. Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Students will receive feedback at various points during the course:
- During intensive days as work towards assessment is developed (formative feedback).
- Through a presentation of group work (formative feedback).
- Ahead of submission of their final individual essay during the post-intensive (formative feedback). |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Understand the theory and rationale for holistic prototyping methods as part of an iterative and human-centred design process.
- Understand and gain practical experience of a range of lo-fidelity and rapid prototyping methods and tools.
- Demonstrate ability to make and test a prototype of a service experience in response to emerging contemporary social, economic and data-driven challenges.
- Document, critically reflect and learn from prototyping and testing of service experiences.
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Reading List
Indicative Reading List:
Essential Reading:
Stickdorn, M., Hormess, M. E., Lawrence, A., & Schneider, J. (2018). Chapter 7: Service Prototyping. This is service design doing. O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Marion Buchenau and Jane Fulton Suri. 2000. Experience prototyping. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (DIS '00). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 424-433. https://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347802
Krause, 2018. Storyboards Help Visualise UX Ideas. Norman / Nielsen Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/storyboards-visualize-ideas/
Blomkvist, J., & Holmlid, S. (2010). Service prototyping according to service design practitioners. In Conference Proceedings, ServDes. 2010, Exchanging Knowledge, Linköping, Sweden, 1-3 December 2010 (Vol. 2, pp. 1-11). Linköping University Electronic Press.
Recommended Reading:
John Vines, Mark Blythe, Stephen Lindsay, Paul Dunphy, Andrew Monk, and Patrick Olivier. 2012. Questionable concepts: critique as resource for designing with eighty somethings. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1169-1178. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208567
Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., & Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Simon and Schuster.
William Odom, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Hajin Choi, Stephanie Meier, and Angela Park. 2014. Unpacking the thinking and making behind a user enactments project. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 513-522. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2602960
Chris Elsden, David Chatting, Abigail C. Durrant, Andrew Garbett, Bettina Nissen, John Vines, and David S. Kirk. 2017. On Speculative Enactments. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5386-5399. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025503
Further Reading:
James Pierce and Eric Paulos. 2014. Some variations on a counterfunctional digital camera. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 131-140. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2602968
David Chatting, David S. Kirk, Abigail C. Durrant, Chris Elsden, Paulina Yurman, and Jo-Anne Bichard. 2017. Making Ritual Machines: The Mobile Phone as a Networked Material for Research Products. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 435-447. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025630
'Mother of All Demos' - Doug Englebart, 1968. https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/ |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Mindset:
Enquiry & Lifelong Learning: This course will provide students with an understanding how making and doing through iterative prototyping are key to learning and addressing real-world challenges.
Outlook and Engagement: This course will help students recognise the value of engaging end-users frequently and iteratively in the design of any product, policy or service.
Skills:
Research and enquiry: This course will equip students with core understanding of design thinking, and a range of practice-led prototyping and research methods.
Personal and Intellectual Autonomy: The course provides students with means to think and learn about new technologies and services through making and doing.
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| Keywords | Design Methods,Service Design,Prototyping,Making,Experiential Futures,Service Prototyping |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Chris Elsden
Tel:
Email: chris.elsden@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr David Murphy
Tel:
Email: dmurphy7@ed.ac.uk |
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