MA Thesis

Investigating the impact of unintentional design aspects.

My master thesis explores the design and prototyping process of the Urban Data Posts project – a public light installation which playfully displays urban and communal data.

Inspired by Annotated Portfolios, this works establishes the notion of the Focus Framework as a tool to capture intentional and unintentional design aspects in prototypes. Using the Focus Framework to analyse all 16 prototypes developed for the Urban Data Posts project, this research reveals how the project’s final design is fundamentally rooted in unintended and unexpected design aspects of earlier prototypes. This provides a better understanding of the complex interplay between a designer and her prototypes and exemplifies what impact unintentional and unexpected design aspects can have in a design process.

The main contribution of this research, among others, is the Focus Framework, which captures intentional and unintentional design aspects in prototypes.

…this research reveals how the project’s final design is fundamentally rooted in unintended and unexpected design aspects of earlier prototypes.

Schilling, M. L., Wakkary, R., & Odom, W. (2018). Focus Framework: Tracking Prototypes Back-Talk. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, 684–693. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173259

Schilling, M. L. (2016). Focal Point: Analyzing the Shift Of Focus When Prototyping [Master of Arts, Simon Fraser University]