Prototyping Sprint - a final boost in prototyping Heloisa Neves, Founder We Fab e Pesquisadora FGVIn We at We Fab had previously worked with École de Nantes and Mackenzie on immersion ‘sprints’ with students, but always in person. As this year the Coronavirus changed the whole process, we thought it would not be possible to do it because the students were all distributed. But, as we had been thinking since the beginning of the pandemic about alternative forms for this type of dynamics, we proposed a test, which proved to be quite positive in the end. When we started Prototyping Sprint, the students were already in groups and had already developed their projects, but they had not had a physical prototyping experience due to the closing of the laboratories. We then decided to select two prototypes (the ones that best fit a remote model and the time we had) and let the students know that the last week would be devoted to a remote immersion to give a final boost and deepen the projects. We reorganized the class into two groups and focused on the Finder and Seve projects. As steps, we had: - Version 2.0 of the low-fidelity prototypes (both of the product, as well as the digital and visual part) - Feedback with users - Start of medium fidelity prototyping - Feedback with makers - Feedback from experts - Finalization of physical, digital prototypes and final refinement of the visual part. We structured ourselves as follows: students participated in their homes and we had a team of six facilitators (4 remotely and 3 in our prototyping laboratory in São Paulo). We had dynamics every day between 9:00 and 12:00 hours and a few hours of work and “check-points” where students presented the results of the afternoon’s work and our facilitators presented what was being developed in the laboratory. We use a pool of tools such as Zoom, Mural, Dropbox and What’s App to communicate, exchange files and carry out ideation and feedback dynamics.
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Throughout the week we alternate product development with different levels of prototyping, check-points and feedbacks from users, makers and experts. These dynamics aimed to offer a way of developing a project based on the agile methodology where it works in a spiral format: prototype -> forehead -> itera And at the end of the iteration, prototyping -> testing -> iterating again, until the end of the week. The process surprised us positively. It was the first time that we ran a Prototyping Sprint completely remotely and we were successful. Despite details that we can always adjust for the better, we think it is a viable model for teaching the Design project. As positives, we highlight that in a remote process we have the facility to invite people from anywhere in the world for feedback, which increases the quality of this dynamic itself. We are also positive that the digital environment gives voice to all students regardless of whether they are the most communicative. And as a final result, we understand that prototyping is possible even in times of social distance. It is not as real or as close to the student, but it is something that does not need to be excluded from teaching. Just as in many areas the pandemic accelerated processes that were already emerging as alternatives, in Education it was no different. It brought up the discussion of online education and forced us to test new models, which proved to be really interesting and possible to be applied in future projects.
