Business Origami Paper Prototyping

Paper-prototyping interactions and value exchanges among people, artifacts, and environments

• Business origami is a service design activity where stakeholders build a physical representation of a system and then prototype future or alternative states.
• Paper tokens represent actors, artifacts, environments, and technologies on a horizontal whiteboard “stage” where interactions play out to tell a story.
• Lines and arrows labeled on the whiteboard represent the interactions between tokens, articulating what value people get out of the exchange.
• The method gives all participants an equal voice in the prototyping activity, bridging different perspectives by providing a common reference for further discussion.
• The experience of physical modeling is critical, making the value exchange explicit within a scenario.