Slider Tool
The slider tool is useful in both the specification and iteration phases of designing an intervention. It borrows from digital photo editing programs where sliders are used to let you see changes before committing to them. A slider for saturation lets you see how an image would appear with heightened color or with almost no color, for instance.
The slider lets you try variations in order to discover moments that pop, even ones that you might not have directly aimed for yourself. By testing lots of variations, including ones that seem at first like terrible ideas, you set yourself up to see things you wouldn’t have known to look for. This is a tool that collaborates with the part of you that knows how to recognize something it never would have thought of.
In designing an intervention, you want to test whether your intervention is taking a particular shape because that’s the most powerful way for it to be, or because it’s just what you are used to doing. How does a brass band consider the power of muted sound? How does a canvasser consider not handing anything out? How does an anarchist bookstore consider charging admission? (Again, these tests aren’t trying to get anything right, just to invite consideration of a wider range of approaches.)
This tool can be used in the specification phase or in the iteration phase. You can do this alone, but you’ll get further if you use this tool alongside others.
Instructions
Set-up: You’ll want to get yourself set up with one of the slider tool pages. If you have access to a printer you can print them out and then use coins or pebbles or some other object as your slider. You can also open the pages in any software program that lets you draw on a digital image. At ds4si we’ve made ourselves some small magnet whiteboards to work with this tool.
Gather together in a way that lets you look at your current intervention prototype. Moving slowly through each of the items on the slider, move the marker to where on this range you think the prototype currently hits. Take time to talk with one another about why you each see it where you do. This is one way to close read your prototype - seeing what effects it’s having as it is before you try to generate variations.
Once you’ve close read the prototype, you can now shift to generating variations on your first prototype. Choose one of the slider elements and push the marker towards one or the other extreme and ask yourselves how would the intervention need to change if you wanted it to be a little louder, or quieter? If you took it up into the sky or took it underground? If you pushed it towards the poetic, or towards the political. For each of these slides, take the time to describe to one another how this shift would change the intervention and its effects.
As you move the sliders around, note where things get weird or interestingly uncomfortable. You may surprise yourselves with where you end up. Even if you end up right where you started, you’ll do so with a stronger sense of what works about your design choices. If you found variations that spark your interest, consider how you might now prototype these possibilities.
Consider coming back to this tool in the iteration part of the design process. At that moment you’ll do the same thing you did here with your prototype, but using your intervention as the thing you are looking at. This lets your intervention now function as a kind of prototype for the next version of itself.
See other Iteration tools
