Turning Junk Into Gold: Rapid Prototyping Activities You Can Do in 30 minutes
Written with Jordan Wirfs-Brock
Last week, we found ourselves trying to line a champagne bottle top with a dog-poop bag. Why? So that we could fill it with gummy fruit snacks and attach it to one of our wrists, naturally. No really, why? We were taking a break from our normal work as PhD student researchers — staring at our computer screens, reading papers, analyzing data — to practice rapid prototyping. We didn’t end up creating anything earth-shattering: It was a prototype of a smartwatch that is also a nutrition expert that doles out snacks to help people regulate their caloric intake. But more importantly, we spent half an hour confronting our fears of perfection by forcing ourselves to rapidly ideate and build.
Here’s how we did it.
Activity: Finding Inspiration in Arbitrary Items
Note: This activity was based on materials in John Spencer’s toolkit for encouraging creativity in classrooms. Check out his website for lots of resources on teaching creativity.
Step 1 — Collect whatever strange or mundane items you find sitting on your desk or hidden in your junk drawer: paper clips, plastic bags, forks, glass jars, rubber erasers, yogurt lids, cardboard packaging, mustard packets, you get the idea…
Our junk pile included plastic forks and spoons, dog poop bags, an olive jar, binder clips, tape, and a champagne bottle topper.
Step 2 — (If you are doing this activity in a group, do this part individually.) Set a timer for 5 minutes. This is important! The time pressure will motivate you. Before the timer goes off, write as many things that you could make with the things in your junk pile. Self-watering flower pot? Great! Amusement park ride for a cockroach? Awesome! At this point, reserve judgement. The goal here is quantity, not quality.
Some of our ideas included: sail boat, gaiters to keep your feet dry, waterproof hat, smart bird feeder, and many more…
Step 3 — (If you are doing this activity in a group, do this part together. ) Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write all of your ideas on sticky notes and arrange them in clusters. Based on the similarities, see if you come up with any new ideas. Are there ways to combine some of the ideas, or extend them? Together, choose one that you want to prototype and figure out who this object will be for and what purpose will it serve.
After making our clusters, we decided to make a smartwatch nutrition expert which doles out gummy candies in measured quantities.
Step 4 — (If you are doing this activity in a group, do this part together.) Set a timer for 15 minutes. Here’s the part where you actually build a functional (albeit low-fidelity) prototype of your idea. Yes, some things won’t work fully, but that’s the fun part — how can you get as close as possible with the limited materials you have?
Make sure to test out your prototype by wearing it, using it, acting out some of its functions, etc.
For our prototype, we ended using sticky notes, the champagne bottle topper, some portion of the dog-poop bag, and some tape.
Here’s how it looked.
What we learned from this activity
What we liked about this activity: It was fun! We came up with a lot more ideas than we thought we would. (Even though it was hard.) The time pressure was super helpful in getting us to push past our need for perfection. Even though our prototype wasn’t fully functional, we still gleaned some insights about where a wrist-mounted food container should be placed and how long a robotic lid should be open for someone to only be able to grab a single fruit snack.
What we would change about this activity: Initially, we didn’t have any constraints, which made synthesizing our brainstormed ideas difficult because they were all over the place. We think this might have worked better if we had chosen a loose topic to focus on (i.e. fitness, work productivity, games/play).
How to make prototyping part of your weekly routine?
To tackle this problem, we generated prototyping prompts for each other that we could use as mini assignments whenever we need a break from our regular work. The idea is to spark your creativity by giving yourself some constraints. We got this idea from Audio Playground and Learning to Love You More, which are projects centered on building creative practice and community through short but provocative assignments that participants are encouraged to share with each other.
Step 1 — Define your focus area. What types of projects do you want to extend through regular prototyping. In our case, our topics were games and voice assistants.
Step 2 — Exchange your topic with a partner. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Come up with as many prototyping prompts as you can. Here are some of ours:
- Make a game that a cat or dog would want to play.
- Make a board game but don’t write any rules/instructions for it. Give it to someone and let them come up with the rules. OR Find a game that is new to you. Don’t look at the rule book. Try to play it without the rules/try to reverse engineer the rules.
- Make a voice assistant that gives you only the news that most people in the US are watching.
- Make a reflection journal that plays you a sonification of your stress levels every week.
What we learned from this activity
Sometimes it helps to get out of your research topic bubble and think about someone else’s project, or to have someone else’s thoughts on yours. Accountability is important for incorporating prototyping regularly into your work, so having a prototyping buddy can be helpful.
What kinds of things do you do to stimulate creativity and rapid ideation in your daily work? We’d love to hear your ideas.
If you try any of these activities, let us know how they go.
