Recently out interaction designers Maria and Franzi told us about paper prototypes and how to use them when finding out what customers will like and what they won’t understand. The idea behind it is, that customers (or whoever gives you feedback) are more willing to criticize when they can guess that not too much work already went into development. On top of that, it saves the time to create “real” prototypes.
I already liked the paper prototypes very much, because there’s always one in the team acting as the computer (that means, he scrolls the paper when you tell him, lays a new “screen” in front of you when you pretend to click somewhere etc.). I actually never saw it, but I imagine it to be pretty amusing.
But here’s something even nicer – Google knitted some screens. Awesome!
you might like this one too : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVkCauv0IGU
Another idea that I like very much is Wizard-of-Oz-prototyping named after the famous children novel. In this experimental setting hidden humans pretend to be computers and simulate system responses according to the testing users actions. I discovered some academic work in this area during my research on sketching software, but I’m afraid these ideas didn’t make it into real life: see http://dub.washington.edu:2007/sketchwizard/ or http://hci.stanford.edu/research/ex-a-sketch/
Wizard-of-Oz-prototyping doesn’t follow the very low tech approach, but maybe this kind of wizardry nevertheless needs less effort, expertise and skills then knitting or crocheting