Abstract
Can we enable anyone to create anything? The prototyping tools of a rising Maker Movement are enabling the next generation of artists, designers, educators, and engineers to bootstrap from napkin sketch to functional prototype. However for technical novices, the process of including electronic components in prototypes can hamper the creative process with technical details. Software and electronic modules can reduce the amount of work a designer must perform in order to express an idea, by condensing the number of choices into a physical and cognitive “chunk.” What are the core building blocks that might make up electronics toolkits of the future, and what are the key affordances? We present the idea that modularity, the ability to freely recombine elements, is a key affordance for novice prototyping with electronics. We present the results of a creative prototyping experiment (N = 86) that explores how tool modularity influences the creative design process. Using a browser-based crowd platform (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), participants created electric “creature circuits” with LEDs in a virtual prototyping environment. We found that increasing the modularity of LED components (i) increased the quantity of prototypes created by study participants; and (ii) increased participants’ degree of perceived self-efficacy, self-reported creative feeling, and cognitive flow. The results highlight the importance of tool modularity in creative prototyping.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anderson C (2014) Makers: the new industrial revolution. Random House, New York
Baldwin CY, Clark KB (2000) Design rules: the power of modularity, vol 1. MIT Press, Cambridge
Bandura A (1977) Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavior change. Psychol Rev 84(2):191–215
Csikszentmihalyi M, Csikszentmihalyi IS (1992) Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge university press, Cambridge
Dow SP, Glassco A, Kass J, Schwarz M, Schwartz DL, Klemmer SR (2010) Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact 17(4):18
Engeser S, Rheinberg F (2008) Flow, performance and moderators of challenge-skill balance. Motiv Emot 32(3):158–172
Kulkarni C, Dow SP, Klemmer SR (2014) Early and repeated exposure to examples improves creative work. In: Plattner H, Leifer L, Meinel C (eds) Design thinking research. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 49–62
Hartmann B, Doorley S, Klemmer S (2008) Hacking, mashing, gluing: understanding opportunistic design. IEEE Perv Comput 7(3):46–54
Hartmann B, Klemmer SR, Bernstein M (2005) d. tools: integrated prototyping for physical interaction design. IEEE Pervasive Computing
Marsh RL, Landau JD, Hicks JL (1996) How examples may (and may not) constrain creativity. Mem Cogn 24(5):669–680
Miller GA (1956) The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychol Rev 63(2):81
Pimmler TU, Eppinger SD (1994) Integration analysis of product decompositions. Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Sadler J, Durfee K, Shluzas L, Blikstein P (2015a). Bloctopus: a novice modular sensor system for playful prototyping. In: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction. ACM, pp 347–354
Sadler J, Shluzas L, Blikstein P, Katila R (2015b) Creative chunking: modularity increases prototyping quantity, creative self-efficacy and cognitive flow. In DS79: Proceedings of the third international conference on design creativity, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
Tierney P, Farmer SM (2002) Creative self-efficacy: its potential antecedents and relationship to creative performance. Acad Manage J 45(6):1137–1148
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sadler, J., Shluzas, L., Blikstein, P., Katila, R. (2016). Building Blocks of the Maker Movement: Modularity Enhances Creative Confidence During Prototyping. In: Plattner, H., Meinel, C., Leifer, L. (eds) Design Thinking Research. Understanding Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19641-1_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19641-1_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19640-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19641-1
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)