Future Footprint: Explore the Unexpected Future from the Existing Signals Through the Prototype Inspiration

Abstract: Under the exponential growth of the computing power of artificial intelligence, the revolution of thinking that designers pursue turn to qualitative rather than quantitative. Instead of trying to capture as many signals as possible, it's judging and internalizing the signals. Design and art practitioners are widely considered to be the most divergent thinkers, and the early stages of design thinking include a variety of heuristic tools to guide users through brainstorming and propose as many solutions as possible in a short period. We analyzed the research of creativity generation on designers, restored and summarized their commonalities upward, and established the basic format of design signals. Based on this, we explored how to inspire designers to pull out from the rigid thinking system, to discover more unknown connotations, more perspectives, and possibilities for understanding. This paper attempts to promote a path of inspiration to explore the desirable future. By exploring and analyzing the path of designers to generate design inspiration, we propose the Prototype Inspiration tool of the future footprint and start from three dimensions of future signals, values, and personal experience. Inspire the design team to generate a quality conception of the future based on the separation, integration, and reorganization of real signals in a short time. And introduce the prototype inspiration tool with future thinking through the application and verification in the real teaching environment, which expands the dimension and depth of design ideas in the early stage of design. We inclined to think future ideas not as being created out of thin air but as being stimulated, as breaking down stereotypes by reconstructing vague, scattered information. This requires developing sensitivity to information and an accurate sense of trends. The prototype heuristic is a preliminary solution proposed by us at the present stage. In the following sections, we will apply the prototype heuristic to a more specific design context to test the effective range of the tool and discuss how the interactive effects and heuristic effects change when multiple people use AR tools remotely. We have several directions for our future work. One direction is to recognize the impact of our proposed prototype heuristic tools on the design concept in new or existing tools, and to examine the impact of creative output on the overall design process. Second, we will further quantify the designer's propensity and familiarity with the various signals, and how they use affects design activities. Third, try to bring both the input of creative inspiration and the output of creative ideas into the prototype inspiration system, that is, to realize the whole thinking process in AR. Fourth, build a community and an open platform for future resources to support online and offline collaboration among team members from multiple backgrounds.

Keywords: Prototype Inspiration； Future Signals, Design Ideation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001026

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