“Make it, to break it”
Ideas are great! Having a lot of them can be fortunate, and keeping them in sight invaluable! But they remain abstractions of one’s thinking and constructs of one’s imagination, not necessarily shareable and easy to be understood. And as we humans are children of nature, feeling, learning and interacting with the world through our biological sensory system, it is almost necessary to somehow translate abstract proposals into tangible realities.
Think of this brief: I’d like you to make a chest of drawers.
If you’ve been following this range of posts on discussing design with a business outlook, what you’d do would be to try and empathise with your users, the humans who will live with this object, getting into their shoes, understanding their worldview and defining what the right chest of drawers might be for them, before you start generating options for a new proposed reality.
Picture this result: plenty of sketches, illustrations, colour proposals and trims, detailed views and different perspectives of the most prominent alternatives for your target group. An absolute heaven for the creator and their inner child! But this exploration of ideas needn't just happen on paper. Because so much more has to be taken into account. How can anybody be sure that what they see in a 2D image, feels right in real life? Whether it is a user interface, a service blueprint or a 3D rendering of a product, our biological sensory system has to be the final judge of a good or not so good proposal. The design industry knows this and despite criticism of creating artefacts just for the sake of experimenting, even with the best CAD systems, screen displays and VR technologies available, products such as cars, still today, are prototyped in clay, by hand. Instead of going from a set of computer data (a.k.a. a digital model) straight into production, these objects are sculpted in their actual scale for everyone look at, touch and ponder. Some vehicles challenging conventional automotive development are having designers wonder if this is still the path and other designers are eager to wait it out, based on their previous experience with the market.
Coming back to the chest of drawers, be sure it would be useful to see what the proposal looks like in real life before fully committing to it. Maybe in your ideation session you have merged some ideas, chiseled others and you have created two or three concepts of the entire chest of drawers. And now you have to somehow find a way to go with the proposed reality that seems most prominent. You have to make a decision on which is “the one” darling that goes into production, worth placing 100K of currency with no going back. How lightly would you make this decision? Would you take that risk based on a 2D visual representation or a narrative of the new proposed reality? Can you be sure that you’re not going into the production of an unfitting product? What a waste of effort, materials and assets that would be! What a shame and a missed opportunity!
Keep this question in mind: What might bring you enough reassurance to commit to producing a certain concept, instead of another?
We could learn from others who have been open on why designs didn’t work out. Big companies have been talking about it, and a museum is there to remind us of the learning value of failures in the world of innovation (*note to self: new post alert!). All, testaments that mistakes happen in various levels and that as a designer working with uncertainties, your daily work is to make sure that today you are a bit more certain than yesterday. And that is the progress needed before you commit to the big bucks.
What is a prototype?
Designers, makers, creators and doers with a history of turning ideas into reality have a unique understanding of what the act of bringing something to life entails. They might have had a billion ideas and narrowed them down to just a few concepts, but they understand that ideas are nothing without their proposed implementation and connection to reality. And just thinking about how something on paper will end up in real life, without taking any further action is an exercise in futility. An over ambitious intense cognitive activity that really can be eased, if not rendered unnecessary, with prototyping. Because, let’s face it, thinking can be overrated, and it would be nice to avoid the headaches it causes!
Obviously, I’m joking when saying “thinking can be overrated”. But, overthinking can be the cause of anxiety and inaction, so before overdoing thinking, one has to start taking action. And that means altering current matter by laying out what might or could soon be real. Because a prototype, (etymology: proto-, type, coming from the Greek language) is the first of its kind — the first materialization of something new, an action that offers proof of the research and thinking that took place earlier and a first step to reaching the type of new reality one wants to offer the world.
But talking about the business world, a prototype is any new type of thing that a business plans to put out there. If you’re in the furniture making business building chests of drawers, your prototype would be just that: an object close to the real thing. If you’re in the UI/UX business, you probably need to develop wireframes and screens which help anyone understand how one navigates a new interface. If you’re in the service design business, you probably need to make a prototype of the experience a user is meant to have, playing out a sequence of events and actions.
A prototype can really be any materialized trial of an idea, and because ideas come in any size, prototypes which are bound to realism need to cater to the materiality of ideas. Thus, depending on the scale of ideas, some prototypes can come in a 1:1 scale. Possibly this is the most preferred scale, since, in the end, “what you see, is what you get”. However, it can be the case that the prototype depicts the entire idea in a different scale. Think of prototypes of skyscraper buildings, a.k.a. scale models.
Then, sometimes, even when the proposal is of large scale, its creators need to see a small part in a 1:1 scale for whatever reason, so they build just that. A note of caution though: one ought to be careful in regard to how this part interacts with the rest of the proposal — it may be that unforeseen interactions with non-prototyped parts make the full thing unworkable.
Other times, a part of the proposal is built and examined under a smaller scale for other reasons. Think of a boat hull scale model in a hydrodynamic experiment. It is there to understand hydrodynamics of the new vessel design and is less interested in deciphering how people onboard navigate the hull. A different prototype would address that.
Additionally, a prototype can carry qualitative information, such as the intended use of materials and textures, colors, forms and geometries. A wide range of qualities that the end product or service must take into account, trialed and placed in their almost real spot.
Finally, you’d want to remember that prototypes which serve different purposes can come in different qualities. You can have the glossy kind, where everything is “polished” and looks as final as possible, where plenty of work has gone into building and making the proposal look “near final”. But you can have the other kind we refer to as low-fidelity prototypes, which can be scruffy, quick and dirty explorations of thoughts that serve their purpose as “learning devices”. Personally, I find these extremely interesting, as they are evidence of trails of thought and the R&D process.
Prototyping vs. creating waste
There have been people who said that prototyping, other than its benefits, generates a lot of unwanted trash. Items that eventually go unused, scrap materials, contrapments that have nothing to do with the final proposal. Thinking like this may be the mindset of a consumer — a person who finds a ready-made object, obtains it, expects it to function and be used as it is prescribed. In this sense, it is true that a prototype is useless, because it does not work aesthetically or functionally as the final product would or should.
On the other hand, the mindset of the creator sees each failed prototype, each piece of scrap created, each piece of waste gone unused as a lesson and a module of the newly attained physical knowledge. Because every prototype brings you closer to the result you’re after, working out the details as you move forwards, or practicing “learning by doing”, where anyone can envision how the product or service is used and even consider alterations based on the user’s worldview before committing to making it for real, in large numbers, with all consequences. So rather than waste, a prototype ought to be considered as bringing wealth to the design team.
So, I’m sorry to say to those concerned that even designing waste out of our everyday lives requires prototyping and obtaining knowledge by “wasting material” for a good reason. Once the product or service begins their real life out there, all the generated physical or digital prototypes may be considered scrap material and treated accordingly. Though, this might be a tough moment for the creatives who have given birth to them. Just ask around…
What good is a prototype anyway?
From what has been shared above, it must already be clearer that every prototype of a product or service is one step closer to its final version. And especially a polished high-fidelity prototype can be really close to the real thing. But early prototypes can be useful for the creators’ team to give matter to nebulous thoughts and begin the conversation between intangible idea and tangible reality.
Then, prototypes are great conversation companions. Once a design team learns to listen to prototypes, discussions can fire up! Because, being the interface between ideas and reality, prototypes provide answers to issues for which creators might have been unsure of. Furthermore, they create a whole new range of questions for the design team only to get deeper into the challenge. And these questions will probably lead to new prototypes to provide greater reassurance. Just to share an example, Sir James Dyson, the legendary inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner created more than 5,000 prototypes to get things right.
But apart from questions and answers, prototypes can bring new aspects of the product or service to the attention of the design team. They help us stumble on things we didn’t know we dοn’t know, and will now have to find out. These can be anything from big unknowns for which we might have to go back to earlier stages of the project, e.g research and understand users, to small nuances in product details that can make the difference to the users’ experience, i.e. designing meticulously where to place the screws in the chest of drawers to make them part of the design.
How to prototype
Often, when confronted with the means to create a prototype, unaccustomed grown-ups can have a hard time grasping ways to make a prototype, when all they really need is to tap into the curiosity of their inner child. It does not take much to put together a low fidelity prototype. Basic drawing and making skills obtained in kindergarten suffice. Really!! Cutting and glueing, colouring in and writing can be enough. Then, there is the option of putting together objects, making a sort of 3D collage out of ready-mades just to offer a quick sense of geometries, scales and usability — definitely unrefined. Going more ‘grown-up’, one can use basic tools and power tools found in any household to make things that can be a bit more complex and refined. A further level up would be the use of a machine workshop or makerspace, or even using engineering skills to develop plans materialized by a professional machine operator and model maker.
So, prototyping can be done anyhow — from the easiest way, to the most complex and detailed way. It is up to the creator and what kind of information they want to unlock from their prototype that can dictate how it is made. What blind spots should it reveal?
When to prototype?
If you were to remember when it is good practice to make a prototype, these bullets come to mind:
· when you want to get real
· when things are unclear
· when there are plenty you have not figured out
· when you are stuck and finding it difficult to go ahead
· when you’re getting a headache from thinking too much
· when you seek clarity on fuzzy & foggy ideas
· when you have nothing else to do
· when you have grown bored of your project
Making something with your hands, holding it in front of your eyes, pondering its existence, use and implications is always a good idea. Thinking with your hands can take you a long way. It is what makes design “a practice” instead of a theoretical endeavour, and connects identified needs with preferred futures through our biological sensory system. As further reading, you might want to read this paper where we discuss reading and making things as two intertwined activities to develop and understand objects.
So if you don’t mind me asking: What kind of prototype would you make for the chest of drawers? How are you making it real, and how are you going to be challenging your assumptions? What do you hope to learn from it? Then, what would the next prototype be about?
This text is the fourth in a series of five articles discussing the design process with a business outlook, focusing on the respective Design Thinking steps. You will find the links to the rest below as they are being created.
Intro: “Thinking Design”
Step 1 — [empathize]:
Step 2 — [define]:
Step 3— [ideate]:
Learn how to turn innovation on in any organization or reach out to Found.ation for a tailored solution: thefoundation.gr.
