Home

L22. Prototyping

Sun, 08/07/2011 - 8:04am — monica
Date/Time: 
Mon, 11/14/2011 - 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Resource(s): 
R1. Lin et al., "MD Notes: Designing the Prototype"
R2. Lim et al., "The Anatomy of Prototypes"
R3. Holmquist, "Prototyping: Generating Ideas or Cargo-Cult Designs"
R4. Schrage, "Never go to a Client Meeting Without a Prototype"

A design space can be large and complex, and we can't explore it all at once. Prototypes are representative and manifested forms of design ideas to "view a design's future impact" before it gets built. Proototyping techniques are traditionally contrasted on two dimensions:

  1. Cost and Effort - as constrained by a design project's budget, schedule, and designer capabilities
  2. Fidelity - how realistic or similar is the prototype artifact to a final product or service

But this contrast is too simplistic to describe the range of prototype techniques being used today. For example, for information-intensive services and systems it is much more important to use prototypes to assess the quality and feasibility of the information models.