Multiple Design Ideas and Parallel Prototyping

“When people create multiple alternatives in parallel, they produce higher-quality, more-diverse work and experience a greater increase in self-efficacy.” —Dow, S. P., Glassco, A., Kass, J., Schwarz, M., Schwartz, D. L., and Klemmer, S. R. (2010.) ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 17, No. 4, Article 18

First, the definition:“ Parallel Prototyping” is the process of considering a range of potential design ideas simultaneously before selecting and refining one specific design approach. When applied before iterative design, parallel prototyping enables teams to more fully experiment with and investigate a wide range of opportunities in a design space. It can also help designers to avoid becoming fixated on a design, and avoid “hill climbing” toward a less superior result, which has been a long-standing criticism of the iterative design methodology. (Bella Martin, Bruce Hanington 2012)

According to S.P. Dow et al, theoretical benefits of parallel design:

·         Promote Comparison

·         Encourage Exploration

·         Foster Design Confidence

Contrasting the parallel design is the serial design: among multiple designs at the beginning, only one design concept is ever considered. This one design is repeatedly critiqued and revised. The only difference between the two conditions above was a matter of when participants received a critique on their ideas, after each concept or after multiple creations.

The following graphics explain the two different processes:

Fig. 1. The experiment manipulates when participants receive feedback during a design process: in serial after each design (top) versus in parallel on three, then two (bottom).

Fig. 2. Procedure for serial and parallel conditions, with timing.

Our goal is to combine the parallel design with our group’s (Sungmin and I) educational challenge question. As mentioned in my last blog, our challenge question is “how to overcome students' achievement gap caused by their family background”, such as (1) Parental education, (2) Parental occupation, (3) Home educational resources, (4) Home possession related to classical culture, (5) Books at home, and (6) Wealth. We decided to focus on the middle 3 items (i.e., Home educational resources, Home possession related classical culture, and Books at home).

During our last class meeting, we received tons of invaluable feedbacks and productive comments from our classmates. These helpful feedbacks all contributed to improve or rebuild our prototype.

We consider using technologies at the classroom level and the school level would be one of many possible ways to get over the gap. At least at the very beginning, the students would be supposed to be equally exposed to these resources. Furthermore, if students were provided with an opportunity to access these technologies later on through continuing school programs, such as after-school activity, equality in education in terms of educational resources would be guaranteed to some extent. For example, each classroom would be equipped with a lot of mobile devices (e.g., iPad) and students could have a free access to these devices. Teachers provide education mobile apps, which contain content knowledge or on-line resources (e.g., e-library information) for students. Or students could be invited to a virtual museum or music performance. All of these possibilities could contribute to reducing students' achievement gap to some degree. Besides, we are thinking about a “big family study plan”, or a “resource-sharing plan”, that is, different families (a mix of low-income, mid-class as well as affluent families) take turns to take care of a group that consists of 5 to 8 children on weekdays after school. On one side, the students can study in groups, having more interactions with each other, sharing ideas as well as learning materials and expensive devices. On the other side, this approach would provide more free time for parents; they only need to take care of the group of students once per week.


Since integrating the parallel approach into design practicum can inculcate healthy prototyping habits and help foster a positive outlook toward critique. We hope that by learning and using parallel design, we could gain more feedbacks then come up with a perfect, useful and practical solution to our challenge.