Prototyping is an essential part of the creative process. It’s taking the step from just thinking to actually doing. It’s about taking action — you commit to your idea and turn it into something tangible. It’s making!
For inspiration, I always love going back to my favorite designers, Charles and Ray Eames. They were all about bringing ideas to life and making things happen. The Eameses were constantly experimenting and prototyping as part of their design process and their approach to design by doing led them to develop an innovative technique for molding plywood. Working with your hands and building out your ideas allows you to see things that you may not have thought of before. Prototyping will help you get a better grasp of your idea, and as you iterate, you can continue to refine and improve upon it.
Prototyping is very much a form of research, and it is necessary for testing your product and allows you to make alterations early on. Before you prototype, your idea lives in a vacuum. Once your start prototyping, you realize that other factors come into play that challenge your initial notions. Although I never really thought of it as prototyping before, I’ve done quite a bit of it in sewing. When I first became interested in sewing garments, I was determined to make myself a cute full apron inspired by one that I had seen at Anthropologie. I didn’t have a pattern, so I sketched it out and made some construction notes. In my inexperience, I went straight to cutting and sewing with my final fabric. It was a total disaster and ended up in a bin full of other failures. I essentially wasted a bunch of nice fabric, but I did quickly learn the importance of creating inexpensive muslin drafts. It’s easy to assume that your idea is amazing and will work perfectly, but I’m sure that’s rarely true. Spending a little extra time and effort in creating a basic prototype up front is totally worth it.
When I had my own creative business making pillows with my illustrations, I prototyped as part of the design process. For example, this is how I created my alpaca pillow: I started by sketching a lot. Once I arrived at a sketch that I liked, I drew it directly on a scrap of muslin fabric in pencil, roughly the size that I imagined the finished pillow would be. I cut it, sewed it up, and stuffed it. It was quick and cheap! The first couple of tests were bad, so I tweaked the design, and created another prototype. As soon as the pillow looked good, I vectorized the sketch in Adobe Illustrator. Then I ordered a test print of the illustration on fabric to check the shape, as well as experiment with different color options. I sewed up another prototype with the test fabric, which I showed to others. I received feedback on one of my first iterations of the alpaca pillow that he was too creepy — his ears were way too long and angled, and made him look like he had little horns. I reworked the design and created additional permutations before arriving at the final design. As a business, it was incredibly valuable to prototype and open myself up to criticism to make sure everything worked the way that I wanted it to before dropping money. It was much easier to make something bad early on and fix it right away.
Interestingly, I find that making physical prototypes comes more naturally to me than creating digital ones. Currently, as we delve into wireframing and prototyping in the IxDMA program, one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is learning to let go of the idea everything needs to look finished. When it comes to designing digitally, I want to present things that are high fidelity, but I’ve come to understand the importance of keeping prototypes low fidelity. It’s all about getting your ideas out there! After performing usability tests on one of my low fidelity prototypes for an app, I realized that things weren’t working the way that I intended. Since I didn’t invest tons of time into all of the small design details, I don’t feel super attached to the prototype. I’m in a much better place to seek criticism, and can quickly find the issues that need to be resolved. It also makes it easier to throw away and start over if I have to. I’ve definitely come to terms with the fact that I’m not creating a final product and there can always be more testing.
I couldn’t talk about prototyping without mentioning dealing with failure as part of the creative process. You need to create iterations of the wrong thing to get the right thing, which means admitting that something doesn’t work. You make mistakes, and you get better. If you don’t want to think about it as failing, just think of it as learning. But first, you have to take the initiative to make your ideas happen by prototyping!
