Communication of thinking.

Over the last year I have been working on projects that are quite removed from traditional "product" design, and that are crossing disciplines such as interaction design and service design. As I am not designing objects per se I have been exploring new techniques in order to develop new ideas, explaining new ideas,

I have found that producing scenarios and objects that summarise the thinking and conclusions from my research has been very useful.


More to ask questions, and create a dialogue between me and whoever I am talking to about the project. What I also have learnt is that it really helps to clarify my thoughts.
My more recent projects have been tackling with large, expansive and often fairly abstract topics and themes and by putting my thoughts and topics into scenarios and objects really helps to explain and focus my thoughts.



One example was for a project I am working on at the moment that is dealing with fairly abstract subjects including fear, control and protest. The wealth of research I collected, both user research and desk theoretical research, needed to be clarified and organised in order to explain to my tutors and other guests at our show. I divided y research into a number of categories and then generated ideas around these categories. I then created a range of objects and scenarios around each of these ideas. It made it so much easier for people attending to understand the process I was going through, and also my potential directions and allowed them to contribute thoughts and ideas- and we could exchange dialogue.

I feel this is really invaluable, especially when dealing with complex design problems.