Prototyping Tools - Projektwoche @HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd

The choice of design-tools is often considered a preliminary act that proceeds design itself. But in fact, the choice of tools is always a design-decision, always an integral part of each design-process that steers design in certain directions. Therefore, fundamental questions that every designer should ask are: What is it that my tools are suggesting to me? What is it that they are bringing to my work? From the perspective of interface-design, that discipline that makes decisions about how we encounter systems and interact with them by means of models, more detailed questions can be raised: How are such tools composed? What are their properties? How do they work? And how can we not only consciously use, but also consciously design them? To address these questions, in the first part of the workshop, we created our own interface design tools in the form of 3D-printed stamps. In a subsequent second part then, we applied our stamp-sets to a variety of different tasks to reflect on their effects.