Make It.
Rapid prototyping helps companies evaluate products faster than ever, saving time, money, and a world of hurt.
I remember when I was young and all I wanted to do was tinker — with legos, bikes, electronics. I distinctly remember the day my dad allowed me to play with a few of his carpentry tools— I was so eager to play and see what I could make. Throughout my career, I have also seemingly worked in the material world — as a shop manager at an engineering firm, a print producer, and a teacher at a MakerSpace. While a lot of the work I do is on the screen, it’s incredibly important to remember that getting off the screen and into the field is the only way to test your products validity in the physical world. Rapid prototyping saves you and your company time and money.
Curiosity
A few days ago, I was watching Tony Fadell’s TED talk on great design. In it he talks about a changing mental construct as we grow from kids to adults. This mental construct affects the way we see the world, interact with the world, question the world, and ultimately, change the world. Tony says, “we need to think like kids again.” Kids are always questioning the world around them, unafraid of the outcome because they aren’t afraid of the consequences. There have been arguments over whether curiosity can be taught or whether it’s inherently in some people, but wherever you fall, it’s widely accepted curiosity is the fuel for the creative fire. We must question everything we do in a day — even those micro-interactions that have become habit — understand people and cultural trends, question how things work and why they are the way they are, and work to move humanity forward. In his most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, Tony Wagner says,
“What we’re learning about innovation is the importance of failing early and failing often…failing forward, failing fast and cheap. The whole idea of trial and error is something that is antithetical to our formal systems of education.… In fact, we penalize failure.… So there’s a complete contradiction between the world of schooling and the world of innovation.”
The concepts of play, tinker, and invent must be re-introduced in our education systems and companies must push to invest in it.
The MakerSpace Mentality
Make shit. That’s really the mentality of a MakerSpace. It’s the idea that there is a place you can go that has the tools to make anything — from a custom rig for your jeep, to a kitchen table, a robot, or a gas powered bike. I worked at one for about 6 months when I lived in San Luis Obispo a few years ago. Let me tell you, it was awesome. We taught kids how to make DIY hovercrafts, magnets, boats, and catapults, we worked with 3D printers, router tables, laser cutters, and welders, and we even built some furniture for our apartment…
But that is for a whole different post.
So what is the maker movement? I believe Adweek’s definition is right on point:
“The maker movement, as we know, is the umbrella term for independent inventors, designers and tinkerers. A convergence of computer hackers and traditional artisans, the niche is established enough to have its own magazine, Make, as well as hands-on Maker Faires that are catnip for DIYers who used to toil in solitude. Makers tap into an American admiration for self-reliance and combine that with open-source learning, contemporary design and powerful personal technology like 3-D printers. The creations, born in cluttered local workshops and bedroom offices, stir the imaginations of consumers numbed by generic, mass-produced, made-in–China merchandise.”
The Maker movement is about becoming a kid again — playing with tools, understanding different materials, how things are built and put together (which includes taking things apart!), and making your visions come to life. The Maker movement is about connecting with your community and helping others succeed. The Maker movement teaches people the value of creative collaboration as a tool for innovation.
As MakerSpaces have popped up in cities around the world, there’s a lot of nuances startups and corporations can pull from the Maker movement. Hands on learning, like that at MakerSpaces, ultimately helps teach problem-solving skills, not just specific technical skills. Make it, test it, refine, repeat. Millions of people in MakerSpaces around the world are prototyping their designs everyday, making new ones, starting new products, and finding new, sustainable ways to manufacture them. We’ve been making things by hand for thousands and thousands of years, conquering incredible feats like building the pyramids, Inca empire, or figuring out how to fly, humanity has always found ways to innovate, connect, and be resourceful. The Maker movement fully embodies the prototyping culture.
Our Prototyping Adventure
Last week, we were tasked with prototyping an idea we had for our Emerging Interfaces class. The assignment was to create an internet of things (IoT) connected device for backpacking. This device had to be something that couldn’t detract from the innate beauty in nature and empowered you to remove yourself from the material world — email, internet, Facebook, etc. So… we begin to ideate.
Motivated by the recent story of the woman who died a only a quarter mile off the trail after she went to the bathroom, we finally settle on an idea to solve the problem of getting lost. We’ve all had that moment when we got lost in our thoughts, unbeknown to the impending darkness, only to further be disoriented upon dusk. It’s a problem we solved with a Breadcrumb Beacon System, a system designed as a wayfinding tool for your mountain adventures. As you started your adventure, you would leave the receiver modules along your path, acting as a wayfinding system to help you retrace your steps. This system used a combination of low power Bluetooth, light and sound to locate each breadcrumb and lead you along your adventure.
Now… to the prototyping. We used prototyping as a tool to further our convey and solidify some of our design decisions. We used it as a tool to test the individual parts that were essential to the end product and the possible downfalls there may be. Prototyping made us think of how, and why, we would use this product. Prototyping made us the user. Ultimately that is who we’re designing for, isn’t it? We had to break down our product into smaller, more tangible parts that we could test on a low fidelity scale to ensure that each part of our device could work together, with the environment, and provide value for the user. Getting to the prototyping stage as fast as possible is incredibly important so that you can kill a feature that ultimately won’t work, adjust some of your design functionality, or scrap the idea entirely. Prototyping helped us validate our ideas, kill the bad ones, and gather some data to back our tested ideas up.
For us, last week, we relied on the most basic forms of prototyping — cardboard, pipe cleaners, an iPhone, and a speaker. Ultimately, this was all we needed to validate our ideas… and in this case less was more. We could spend less time getting to the prototype and more time refining our idea. This is what low fidelity prototypes are for. As the process moves forward, higher and higher fidelity mockups are required to show off proof of concept to investors, board members, or your boss. But, as with more complicated tools, the time it takes to create these prototypes increases as well. So, it’s important to use the low fidelity tools for proof of concept, and save those higher fidelity 3D printed and Arduino coded prototypes for the pitch meeting.
By embodying the ideals and mentality of a maker, we can not only play like kids, but invent like kids. We can question the small things that we “put up with” everyday and find out how to make them better, look at our habits and find more effective ways of living, and build products that will move both technology and humanity forward. Making and testing our ideas with prototypes, designers are continually making better products that people need, love, and ultimately become part of peoples habitual, everyday lives.
