THE INFLUENCE OF TIMING IN EXPLORATORY PROTOTYPING AND OTHER ACTIVITIES IN DESIGN PROJECTS

ABSTRACT The importance of prototyping in the design process has been widely recognized, but less research emphasis has been placed on the appropriate timing and detail of so-called "throwaway" prototyping during the preliminary design phase. Based on a study of mid-career professional graduate students, statistically significant correlations were found between the time such prototypes were created and design outcome. Building prototypes early on in the design process, or performing additional rounds of benchmarking and user interaction later on during the project (in addition to the typical early stage efforts), correlated with better design outcome, although the total time spent on these activities did not. The correlation between project presentations and reviewer scores are also touched upon. These findings suggest that the timing of design activities is more important than the time spent on them. INTRODUCTION It is widely recognized that decisions made in the early [9]stages of the design process have great bearing on the outcome of the design in terms of design success, cost of manufacturing and time to market. The later in the design process problems are identified and changes made to the design, the more costly it becomes [1-3]. The question then is, how should designers go about exploring the design space in the most efficient way possible, find a desirable design direction, and execute a successful design? on effective ways to conduct different design activities This research examines the timing of prototyping related activities in the early stages of the design process. Research has been conducted on prototyping in the early stages of the design process, with some arguing for early and frequent prototyping as a way to test ideas early [4, 5] and to help build confidence in design concepts in a team [6]. There are several different design activities that have been recognized as important to design outcome and have been widely researched. These range from prototyping and sketching to benchmarking and collecting input from end-users. Prototyping is often thought of in terms of the particular technology or materials involved in creating the prototype, such as 3D printing or aluminum stock. This paper considers prototypes from a different perspective, that of as an artifact that design teams use to evaluate potential design concepts before further development [7, 8]. These early stage prototypes are created with the express understanding that they will be discarded after evaluation, and are thus "throwaway" prototypes. Using this strategy encourages building the "cheapest" prototype that can still provide needed information, meaning that such prototypes may be made of relatively inexpensive materials and are fast to fabricate. This approach to fabrication has been expressed as "fail early to succeed sooner,"popularized by the design firm IDEO and has been widely cited as a strategy for early stage design[4].Although there has been a significant amount of research