It's hard to simulate non-trivial interactivity with paper. In real life, teams are not always co-located, and software tools facilitate collaboration in different ways.
If anything, the public(consumer)'s appetite for graphic/visual/UX design has gotten a lot stronger in the decade since research was done on paper prototyping. High-quality animations and subtle interaction techniques, explosion in form factors and devices / mobile operating system [versions], and the rise of non-technical app builders may have also encouraged the development of such tools.
> I'm interested in working on/solving big, "wicked" problems through UX design like self driving cars or improving healthcare. Should I get a PhD in HCI and focus on something fulfilling rather than improving the UX of boring SaaS CRUD apps?
For the most part, HCI professors don't care about healthcare and healthcare mostly doesn't care about HCI, for non-obvious reasons.
If you want to work on self-driving cars, maybe get a MS in machine learning and HCI (or human-centered AI if you can make that happen)? If you want to improve healthcare, maybe get a healthcare degree.
(Update: if I were a professor in HCI I might actually tell you yes, come work with/for me ;)
I'm familiar with the academic research in paper prototyping (for background, I have a Ph.D. in CS [HCI], have been a HCI course assistant, and published in academic HCI/design conferences).
To say that paper prototyping is the best implies a certain design philosophy, team structure, and organizational culture. It requires a certain buy-in, level of trust, and design pace that are not appropriate for all industries. There are reasons why most professional UI/UX design tools go to the pixel level, and why sketching interfaces never took off in practice.
That said, there are great benefits to paper, prototyping, and sketching skills. But there are also drawbacks which are not immediately obvious in reading the research literature or taking academic HCI classes.
Thanks for the commentary togelius [1, 2] and deepnet [above].
Anyone interested in adding a soupçon of scholarship to Seth's project?
Words do mean different things to different people, in different contexts..
There is a recent body of literature that explores the modern "maker" [3] movement. However, "maker" as a term may not have been a good fit for the OP's argument [1], which contrasted (academic) researchers with so-called "tinkerers".
An alternative term for "tinkerer" might be "bricoleur", a loanword from French. (Roughly, it still means one who tinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage but has other meanings depending on the academic lens.)
Originally known for work on _Perceptrons_ with Marvin Minsky, AI researcher Papert later adapted theories from education towards the vision of "learning-by-making" and the (young) bricoleur [4]. This can approach can be seen in the evolution from 1960s graphical [turtle] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%2... to Lego https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) to
modern day efforts to encourage coding-for-kids [5,6,7].
When it comes to early education, Turkel argues for epistemological pluralism [8] and cites anthropologist Levi-Strauss in comparing analytic science with a "science of the concrete".
We can appreciate both Seth Bling's concreteness [9] and Togelius's original papers for academics. Almost a decade ago, Togelius introduced Super Mario Brothers as a benchmark for reinforcement learning [10] and, with Karakovskiy, for AI more generally [11].
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Ah I was confused when I saw bull-fighting :). Is the condition on Patients Like Me? I think there's definitely room for supporting communities like this. How's it going so far?
If anything, the public(consumer)'s appetite for graphic/visual/UX design has gotten a lot stronger in the decade since research was done on paper prototyping. High-quality animations and subtle interaction techniques, explosion in form factors and devices / mobile operating system [versions], and the rise of non-technical app builders may have also encouraged the development of such tools.