Ignite 2024: Brett Renfer

Okay, listen. You and your team have developed a fabulous idea. An interactive magic mirror that will teach kids about river creatures, offering fun facts while a digital character mimics their every move. You have a feedback session looming with a hundred fourth graders, yes a hundred and more. You realize to create something testable you have to buy a camera, write some code, make a lot of design decisions, and essentially build the dang thing. That's not a prototype, that's a beta.

So, finding inspiration from an old Marx Brothers gag, you replace the screen with people. Kids laugh, but they interact. Your teammates can more quickly iterate, trying different ideas live. You remember to discover, for example, kids remember facts better when the mirror breaks the fourth wall. Months later, far after the exhibition opens, the lessons linger.

And you approach every question, every project with questions like, Can we test it earlier? Can we test it crappier? Can we make tweaks and pivots easier? After the mirror project, we went on a tear. This is at Bluecadet, and we threw everything we could at visitors, only using tech when that made sense and helped us get stuff in front of visitors faster.

People acting as tech continued to be a favorite technique. And we also prevented some project, I would say disasters, including a screen that was just way too big once you saw it mocked up, but instead of having invested in the time tech and infrastructure support two yes, two 20 foot screens, instead, we spent $20 at Home Depot.

Maybe you can tell, but I'm a little bit obsessed with prototyping, and I'd also be lying if I said this approach just suddenly came to me like a bolt of lightning. Time, money, research, and gentle and not so gentle nudges from great mentors are what brought me here. And in fact, this thread started for me in 2009 on a wildly complicated project.

An 18 story interactive projection driven by a sensor filled megaphone, picnic table, hopscotch, and more. And while I was definitely supported by experts, my job was to make it work. So after freaking out a little bit, I set out to just build the whole thing any way I knew how. A paper cup and pencil megaphone, some milk crates, a picnic table, and a few Arduinos later.

And we had some a mock up that we could share, test, and try out ideas on. And frankly, it was eye opening for me. But then of course somehow bigger and more technically complicated projects appeared where that whole messy mock up the whole thing approach just couldn't cut it. It was time to start reducing.

What if we just tested the smallest part possible? Could we just try a single interaction like pointing at an artwork? Could we use a mix of real tech and a person behind the scenes? This prototype is actually amazing, until a second person walked up. And so that led to another pivot, although not as dramatic as the drop cloth where we basically scrapped the project.

So it was then that my mentor said, hey, you know folks have been doing this sort of like forever, right? So I dug in. Charles and Ray Eames famously said, process isn't magic, and tested mold after mold with butt after butt to find their ideal chair shape. When concepting the Palm Pilot, Jeff Hawkins carried around a hunk of wood in his pocket and pretended to use it anytime he thought something like this would be useful, leading to the precursors of the apps that many of us use every day.

Artists work this way as well. Henri Matisse's famous cutout work started off early in his career as a way to test out compositional ideas before becoming the works themselves towards the end of his life. What a pivot. And, oh my god, in the real world, People even use costumes. They test things like, what would it be like for people to see, you can laugh at this, for people to see an autonomous vehicle with no one in the driver's seat.

This is from Ford and Virginia Tech, who hilariously went viral with this most excellent prototype. So whether you're following in the footsteps of giants of art or industry, or just figuring it out yourself, you too can make crappy prototypes. I believe in you. But where do you begin? First, smash your giant problems into tiny questions.

Second, consider the kind of questions you're trying to ask. Is it about what the experience might be like? What kind of things are you testing there? Is it about the look and feel, the fonts, colors, textures, touch, texture? Is it about whether something is just possible? And if it's one of the first two, do you really need that much tech?

If you're trying out an idea for an interactive that mixes, for example, real objects and projections, Maybe you can just test it with toys and Apple Keynote, even if it's really hard to press the mouse at the same time. It was pretty hard. And if your question is really just, is this at all possible in the first place, then only focus on that.

For that same interactive, I used existing code samples with that very same setup in my office. And I brought my own kid in too. It's a family affair. Finally, trust your visitors and do not fear the pivot. People love giving feedback, even I would say, especially on sketchy prototypes. And that feedback might not be what you want, but that's okay, because you tested early, kept it loose, and mocked it up before you focked it up, right? Thank you.