Using Rich-Prospect Browsing for design scenarios conversation

Abstract

In this paper, building on previous work on scenarios in theatre, design, and business, a series of 4 exercises were carried out in order to reflect on factors that could enhance the use of scenarios within design projects. These factors include the need for a sufficient duration to accommodate the learning aspect of writing scenarios, the tendency for scenarios in design to be positive in nature, and the inclusion of visual prompts rather than just text. Further, the research proposed capturing and reusing the various kinds of information that were produced during the writing of design scenarios. In this case, this information was treated according to the principles of rich-prospect browsing, which suggest that individual items, meaningfully represented, be made available to scenario writers in design for organization and use. Moreover, for this context, we propose an extension of rich-prospect browsing into the representation of information that extends across a range of possible values. Several collections were produced, some physical and some virtual, each of which contained fewer than 100 items. By combining this form of overview with affordances directly associated with the information, rich-prospect browsing simultaneously preserves and makes accessible the kinds of ideas that are prevalent during the process of creating design scenarios. Parametrization is particularly interesting in relation to the concept of rich-prospect browsing, where some meaningful representation of items in a collection is combined with tools for manipulating the display.