SEED Guide
4.2.4. Prototyping
Teams will want to explore prototyping, taking advantage of existing skills and learning how to produce representations of solutions in many different ways. Here are just some of the possibilities:
Prototypes come in many formats so teams should be prepared to explore their proposed solutions to find potential problems that still need to be solved.
Encourage teams to create rough prototypes or mockups of their ideas, even if they are simple sketches or diagrams. Prototyping helps make ideas tangible and allows for rapid iteration and testing to gather feedback and refine concepts further.
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Prototyping: Tools |
Tasks and Steps |
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Role-playing and scenarios |
1. Define the scenario and the people involved. 2. Assign roles and make time to understand the characterization. 3. Enact the solution in the scenario(s) you are proposing to discover where it can break down. Dramatization will help to expose unforeseen difficulties and barriers. 4. Identify the gaps so that you can re-iterate for that specific problem or even for the entire challenge. |
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Papercraft, LEGO, Storyboard, Video, Wireframing |
1. Note the many different materials and tools that teams can use to prototype. |
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Tape and paper clips D.Collective, When You Show a Half-Baked Idea to an Important Client, Medium |
1. Just when your team imagined they had considered everything, find inspiration in this story on prototypes clobbered together from materials at hand |
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Orientations for prototyping Nusselder, André, and María del Carmen Arau Ribeiro, https://designthinking.nusselder.org/prototyping/ |
1. Prepare an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product. 2. Include different aspects of the prototype related to people, objects, locations, and interactions. When the team understands which aspect you would like to learn more about, this can be highlighted in a rapid prototype. 3. Invite the users and stakeholders to build the prototype as co-designers whenever possible. |