Situating situation-based-design- the integration of prototyping to change the scope of design competence

The professional field where industrial designers operate is evolving from a product design tradition into a wider range of relevant areas. Some more recent arrivals – interaction design and service design – offer new dimensions to an already complex discipline. The borders between the different areas are also floating and they become woven together where products appear as a mix of new services based on new interaction elements embedded in physical objects. The article discusses how industrial design students can adapt to developments in the industrial design domain based on shaping an integrative prototyping environment. this implies helping students acquire more integrated prototyping techniques to meet the demands of increased complexity.

The paper argues that students introduced to new prototyping methods are more able to choose between different sets and combinations of tools and arrive at improved means for communicating their ideas of complex, high-tech products. Based on experiments in an industrial design master course, with a focus on prototyping techniques, we have studied how different kinds of prototyping influence the students’ design approaches. Through a set of shorter introduction courses, the students developed new skills in prototyping that seemingly changed their scope. They developed and broadened their way of reflecting upon design strategies by adding a set of less traditional techniques for prototyping to their conventional design competencies.