Based on the Carla Molins Pitarch’s PhD, she introduced us to her recent developed toolkit “Tangible Scientific Concepts Design Process. First, we got the chance to get insights in the toolkit itself and later use it for developing an educational prototype explaining the core functionality of DNA Helix in our body.
Our work was divided in the following stages:
- Ideation
- Prototyping
- Testing
- Final Prototype
Ideation
The goal of this stage was gathering as much ideas as possible and collect them. Finaly we focused on one idea and defined the following questions: What? Why? Where? When? How? For Whom?
Visitors explore the DNA Bases "Letters“ by trying out how they fit together.
Prototyping
In this phase we developed construction ideas on how to build a tangible interface that react to user actions to give feedback of correct and wrong matches of DNA Bases “Letters”.
Testing
For the Testing we used paper cards and pipe cleaners to construct a wire frame prototype. Later we conducted a small user testing scenario with 8 different people to get more insights about the usability of our prototype.
Final Prototype
With gathered information from our user testing, we developed a final prototype which has a circuit logic to give visual feedback of a correct or incorrect match of DNA Base “Letters”.