Prototyping

Prototyping describes the way of checking your design against reality. This can be done in very different ways and at several stages in ones design process. It is possibly the most powerful tool for a designer to work with.

Why do we do Protoyping?

Its a fairytale that designers come up with the design solution (that solves every problem) without iterating. Making prototypes allow us to evaluate an idea of our design but also to recognise faults. It is important to check our idea in real-life since a desingers mind cannot consider every level of a product just by thinking. Especially when it is about checking your concept (so called proof of concept), it makes sense to do so as early as possible in the design phase in order to avoid big changes which results in big costs.

Often Prototypes are not only used to check the overall working of a product but rather to evaluate specific topics. These so called filter prototypes can target following topics: appearance, date, functionality, interactivity, spatial structure.

Prototyping Terminology

In the classical design journey from a design to a final product, there are several stations of testing and evaluating. To make things clear, Jean-Baptiste Labrune introduced us to several stations and told us how they differentiate from each other;

Proof of Concept is not a product and will never be. It is there, to free the designers mind with an idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to work. It is often done by narratives/storytelling in order to place an idea in an environment to check it against a situation.

Mockup describes a prototype that completely disregards constraints of the final product and their production. It serves on one hand inspiration and on the other hand the freedom of producing an idea.