What's in my toolshed: the prototyping edition

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how I go about prototyping. That's a huge topic, because really prototyping is a step along a long, loooong and windy path that begins with an idea. I often analyze in painful detail how I get the idea or what I do with that idea once I have it, but today I want to think through my process in terms of what's in my bag, or what's my setup. 

I think it goes something like this:

I have an idea.
Tools: shower, running shoes, a friend and/or hot chocolate

I sketch out the idea.
Tools: pencil, notebook, ipad, paper53, cosmonaut

I share that idea with a small group of people
Tools: more hot chocolate

This cup is from the  folks at One Girl Cookies in Dumbo

I share that idea with a larger group of people
Tools:  a blog, camera (usually just use my phone)

    

Then, I share the idea with people in my making environments
Tools: github, flickr

I read and write - A lot. I tend to research everywhere from blogs to books, to print articles. I ask experts and novices a like to talk to me.
Tools: New York Public Library, DML, goodreads, the interwebs

What I am reading now: Creative Confidence by the Kelley Brothers. Check it out!

Then I am like omgossssh  I have so many things I need to get organized, so I put all of my tools into some sort of list, or spark file.
Tools: Evernote, etherpad , Google Docs

By this time I realize that I want to make something so that people can have a proof of concept to play around with, so I start to make something interactive.
Tools: POP, Coda2, Cyberduck, Webmaker, Appmaker, Adobe Illustrator, etc.

Then I go into a rapid cycle of user testing -> iterating -> usertesting
Tools: redpen for mockups, user testing websites, Hive meetups, minigroups, groupme, Webmaker demos,  more hot chocolate and chocolate chip cookies.

At this point I kind of move into a decision making phase. This is a whole other set of operations, however I now have a lot of tools at my disposal to make that decision. By now, I have now developed a cohort of people who I am working with to develop the prototype - whether that be user testers, feedbackers or active co-developers.

I should note here that a) this whole process relies heavily on hot chocolate - my current favorite can be found by visiting the Little Sweet Cafe just off of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and b) my process is all about prototyping in the open. I find that prototyping by, for and with people makes my ideas stronger and helps me to fail faster so that I can pick myself up and iterate with more knowledge, more often. I'd love to hear what ways YOU prototype.

Rethinking the Annual Review Self Evaluation

Every year I have to do an annual review - where I meet with my manager and discuss my performance over the course of the past year. Usually these reviews require me to respond to some sort of questionnaire about my work - with questions kinda like these:

List the projects that you worked on?

Which project are you the most proud of?

How can you improve?

  

For my last review, I felt inspired to switch up my submission to my manager and handed her this instead of the traditional q and a response form:

My manager, Erin Knight, responded to it well and was able to ask me relevant questions based on the things that I chose to highlight. This year I was going to take it up a notch and make this an interactive experience. As I started to think about how to go about this work.

The first thing that I did was create a list in Evernote of all of my work:

Then I started to think about if this was going to be interactive - where would I link out to my work. This helped me to realize that I have my work documented in several places online, including: this blog, flickr and github. This lead me to an a-ha moment. I had skills that I wanted to show off, evidence to back up that I did in fact earn or enhance those skills and... I had a peer reviewer to potentially endorse me. Are you following me here? BADGES!

What I imagining here is a re-envisioning of the self evaluation. Instead of thinking about this as an evaluation - you can imagine this being a tool to help to uncover what you have learned over the course of the year and how you could potentially further your learning moving forwards. I am proposing a tool where I can self issue badges, with evidence and have those badges endorsed by my peer. A more complex version of this would integrate career pathways and mentorship opportunities - as well as a recommendation system.

Here is my first sketch on this idea:

Thinking to be continued.....