Efficacious prototyping for early stage industrial design: Understanding what matters in prototyping to make prototyping matter more

Abstract

Prototypes are integral tools designers, engineers and other creatives utilise for developing solutions. In the broadest sense, the term ‘prototype’ may mean different things, and be the means to different ends. Prototypes play a significant role in idea generation in the early stages of design projects and can act as a catalyst for innovation in a collaborative setting. Successful prototypes are thoughtful about their purpose and context of usage. This makes it important to understand how attributes of the prototype and the prototyping process affect the design process. The landscape of design is evolving– increasingly efficient and sophisticated technology is used in the prototyping process. Multiple stakeholders and end-users are involved throughout the design process, which makes collaborative prototyping and co-creation a valuable activity. The objective of this project is to utilise such an understanding to improve the tools and technologies to better support design teams through their process. Secondary source research and semi-structured interviews with designers have been conducted to understand the challenges faced and to investigate the attributes of prototyping such as modality (physical versus digital), fidelity (high versus low), materials and processes used, effort and time spent, and their effect on the process. Throughout a dynamic design process, prototyping can be a part of different phases of a project, can involve different sets of stakeholders, and can need to perform in different ways. A key theme to the findings has been that ‘economy’ and ‘effectiveness’ are broad needs from the prototyping process, and that specific needs - what is meant by economy and effectiveness - can vary across different scenarios.