“Business Origami is a method that has been invented by the Hitachi Design Center. It uses paper cut-outs as symbolic representations of people, groups, channels and environments, to create a miniature model of a system. The cut-outs are placed on a whiteboard or a big piece of paper where the different areas, interactions and flows between the system elements are drawn.”
It has the advantage of taking the physical environment of the user (and the business) into account while designing systems.
I haven’t been able to use it as much as I’d like, but I will definitely use it again. Here are a couple pictures we used in graduate school to walk personas through their experience.
They might have addressed this by now, but for this project we wanted some “WiFi” cutouts, so I made them.