Why Designers Make Prototypes

Have you been asked to make a prototype, or feel like you should be doing more prototyping, but you’re not quite sure why, or not quite sure how to get the most out of prototyping? This article presents 4 reasons designers make prototypes. Understanding these reasons and mapping them onto your project will unlock the power of prototypes and speed up your development efforts.

Barely Tolerance-able

My particular legal field, real estate, requires me to work with engineers frequently. But let me be absolutely frank with you. When I am arranging settlement meetings, I will do all I can to avoid inviting engineers. I do love you guys. But these meetings are about compromise, and engineers struggle with that. Why?

Ideation Techniques: Affinity Mapping

Engineers, scientists, and designers all gather data and then try to make sense of it later. We have equations and models to help us simulate this data. But we also have a problem – these tools were designed for numerical data, and not all data is solely quantitative. Affinity mapping is an abductive reasoning process that enables people to make sense of large amounts of subjective, qualitative, or observational data.

Good Design: Going-to-the-Sun Road

The advent of the automobile presented an interesting design problem for Glacier National Park: how could visitors travel easily to and from each attraction in the park? This road would need to cut through these sharp, rocky mountains through an easy route made for the everyday automobile.

Hidden Engineering: The Design Secrets of Ancient Empires

Water is a force of life and a force of change that every civilization in the history of the world has had to deal with. My work as a licensed professional water engineer includes predicting and controlling flooding. Erosion control is an important part of my work and the basis of why many ancient sites still survive today. Ancient engineers understood the world they lived in and innovated in powerful ways to survive in harmony with the elements.