Introduction: Think, Prep, Sketch

Abstract

There are many situations when you need to plan and think through a range of different ideas, strategies, or courses of action. Often, your task is to find the right tools, or approach for a job and plan a solution to the problem at hand. In other situations is it useful to work through different permutations in your mind and decide which idea is the best to implement. Often though, it is initially difficult to know which design is best and how to proceed. This certainly applies to programmers, when they design and develop visual computer interactive interfaces, or visualisation tools that display big data. In particular, software engineers need often to consider various alternative designs and layouts, before they even think about beginning to program. In this book we present a method that will enable you to contemplate, decide upon and communicate different approaches and ideas. We call it the Five-Designs Sheet methodology, as it is based around sketching alternative designs in five structured sheets. Through presenting this method, we discuss techniques to help you contemplate your ideas, combine them to devise more complex plans and depict them in sketches. These sketches can them be implemented as interface solutions. This chapter covers the main concepts explored in the book and the different skills that we wish you to learn, including: (1) thinking through ideas, (2) preparing to sketch and (3) sketching different ideas and using the Five Design-Sheet methodology for design-thinking.