How To Steal From Cars
3 Tips to improve your prototypes, taken directly from the automotive industry.
1) Use clay
At HausBots, we love 3D printing. At first glance, it seems like the miracle cure to all prototyping and design needs. For the most part, it actually is. However, sometimes a situation arises where you just need to squidge something into the right shape just to make it look right, or maybe the design is simply too big to fit on your printer’s bed.
That’s where clay comes in. The automotive industry has used clay for decades to replicate the entire car in full scale. This is critical where you’ve got so many different people working on a project at a time, and all of them want their side to be represented. The engineers may want a big bonnet area to fit an engine under, the designers want it to look sleek and marketing want it to hold a family in comfort. Those conflicts aren’t easy to resolve on paper, so having a material you can continuously meld into shape can be very useful.
2) Test mules
You’ve got a brilliant idea, but you’re a little way off actually releasing it to the public. You don’t want anyone to know about the idea, but you need user feedback. The ideal thing to do here is to take another leaf out of the automotive book and produce a test mule. This is a functional prototype that does everything you need to test for your final product, but looks nothing like it. This enables you as the designer to maintain that element of secrecy that you need, while trialling the product with users.
Here’s an entirely gratuitous example; When Land Rover were developing the four-wheel drive system for the original Freelander, they didn’t want to give the game away that they were working on a small vehicle, but needed to make sure that it would work. So, they hid their brand-new technology underneath the body of a beaten-up plumber’s van and tested it for a few thousand miles in the real world. No-one suspected a thing.
3) A big launch
With your idea thoroughly squidged and tested, you should be proud. Now it’s time to show it off to the wider world, and no-one does a launch event like the automotive industry. While it probably isn’t necessary for a cash-strapped start-up to hire a racetrack and fly 200 journalists to Monaco, making a song and dance about your innovation is always good. Hosting an event, getting people to attend and allowing them to try it out can seriously boost the success of your idea. Just make sure it actually works….
