I just fin­ished read­ing Bill Bux­ton’s Sketch­ing User Expe­ri­ences and it had quite an impres­sion on me. It starts with a gen­eral, broad argu­ment on the role of design think­ing in busi­ness and prod­uct devel­op­ment, illus­trat­ing how design, design think­ing and design arti­facts are not yet well enough inte­grated and under­stood in tech­nol­ogy busi­ness. A great intro­duc­tion also for non-designers, includ­ing a fan­tas­tic dis­cus­sion of the iPod design and busi­ness story. For design prac­ti­tion­ers, the main part of the book is con­cerned with the activ­i­ties of sketch­ing and pro­to­typ­ing. His main argu­ment is that these two con­cepts are often used inter­change­ably, how­ever serve two very dif­fer­ent pur­poses: Sketches are for get­ting the right design , devel­op­ing the basic idea, the punch­line of the design project. Sketches are quick, dis­pos­able, diverg­ing, and abun­dant. Pro­to­types (as well as usabil­ity test­ing, mock-ups, etc.) are for get­ting the design right — nar­row­ing down the pos­si­bil­i­ties, mak­ing deci­sions, just doing what it takes to get from an idea to a really well designed thing. To expe­ri­enced design­ers, this might sound quite obvi­ous, but I have to admit myself I did not reflect prop­erly on how I use these words, and how I use these design tools. Bux­ton did a great job of intro­duc­ing sub­tle dis­tinc­tions in this area, and gives you lots of dif­fer­ent angles and exam­ples to get it. Great stuff. Oblig­a­tory read­ing for design­ers, and highly rec­om­mended for any­one who has design­ers around them – I promise you will under­stand them much bet­ter afterwards :)