Power of Prototyping

An extract from Tim Brown’s Change by Design.

Building to think

Since openness to experimentation is the lifeblood of any creative organization, prototyping — the willingness to go ahead and try something by building it — is the best evidence of experimentation. We may think of the prototype as a finished model of a product about to be manufactured, but that definition should be carried much further back in the process.

Prototyping is thinking with your hands. This is in contrast with specification-led, planning-driven abstract thinking. Both have value and each has its place, but one is much more effective at creating new ideas and driving them forward.

QUICK AND DIRTY

Although it might seem prototyping will slow you down, it generates results faster. Most problems worth worrying about are complex, and a series of early experiments is often the best way to decide among competing directions. The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them, and zero in on the best solution.

Even rudimentary prototypes can catapult discussions forward, put everyone on same page, and save countless meetings, videoconferences, shop time, and airplane tickets.

Just as it can accelerate the pace of a project, prototyping allows the exploration of many ideas in parallel. Early prototypes should be fast, rough and cheap. The greater the investment in an idea, the more committed one becomes to it. Over-investment in a refined prototype has two undesirable consequences. First, a mediocre idea may go too far toward realisation — or even, in the worst case, all the way. Second, the prototyping process itself creates the opportunity to discover new and better ideas at minimal cost.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as is necessary to generate useful feedback and drive an idea forward. The greater the complexity and expense, the more “finished” it is likely to seem and the less likely its creators will be to profit from constructive feedback — or even to listen to it. The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea to learn about its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generation of more detailed, more refined prototypes. A prototype’s scope should be limited. The purpose of early prototypes might be to understand whether an idea has functional value. Eventually designers need to take the prototype out into the world to get feedback from the intended users of the final product. At this point the surface qualities of the prototype may require a bit more attention so that potential consumers are not distracted by the rough edges or unresolved details.

Some pretty amazing technology is available today for designers to create prototypes quickly and at an extremely high level of fidelity, including ultraprecise laser cutters, CAD tools, 3D printers. But all the technology in the world will come to naught if it is used to create prototypes too refined, too detailed, and too early. “Just enough prototyping” means picking what we want to learn about and achieving just enough resolution to make that the focus. An experienced prototypes knows when to say “Enough is enough.”

PROTOTYPING THINGS YOU CANT PICK UP

Same rules apply when the challenge is a service, a virtual experience, or even an organisational system. Anything tangible that lets us explore an idea, evaluate it, and push it forward is a prototype.

Movie industry has long since used storyboarding. These include scenarios, a form of storytelling in which some potential future situation or state is described using words and pictures.

Scenarios also force us to keep people at the center of the idea, preventing us from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. They remind us at every moment that we are not dealing with things but with “transactions between people and things.”

PROTOTYPING IN THE WILD

Overlooking social dimensions of the problem can be an issue.

An emerging form of “prototyping in the wild” involves the use of virtual worlds such a Second Life or social networks. Companies can learn from consumers about proposed brands or services before they invest in the real thing.

CONCLUDING

All prototypes share a single paradoxical feature: they slow us down to speed us up. By taking time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.

Prototyping is always inspirational — not in the sense of a perfected artwork but because it inspires new ideas. Prototyping should start early in the life of a project, and we expect them to be numerous, quickly executed, and pretty ugly. Each one is intended to develop an idea “just enough” to allow the team to learn something and move on. At this relatively low level of resolution, it’s almost always best for the team members to make their own prototypes and not outsource them to others.

One way to motivate early-stage prototyping is to set a goal: to have a prototype ready by the end of the first week or even the first day. Once tangible expressions begin to emerge, it becomes easy to try them out and elicit feedback internally from management and externally from potential customers. Indeed, one of the measures of an innovative organisation is its average time to first prototype.

In the ideation space we build prototypes to develop our ideas to ensure that they incorporate the functional and emotional elements necessary to meet the demands of the market. As the project moves forward, the number of prototypes will go down while the resolution of each one goes up. If the precision required at this stage exceeds the capabilities of the team, it may be necessary to turn to outside experts — model makers, videographers, writers, or actors, as the case may be — for help.

In the third space of innovation we are concerned wth implementation: communicating an idea with sufficient clarity to gain acceptance across the organisation, proving it, and showing that it will work in its intended market. Here too, habit of prototyping plays an essential role.

When a new idea is almost ready for implementation, it will often be tested in the form of a pilot deployment.