Prototyping is interwoven with nearly all product, service, and systems development efforts. A prototype is a pre-production representation of some aspect of a concept or final design. Prototyping often predetermines a large portion of resource deployment in development and influences design project success. This review surveys literature sources in engineering, management, design science, and architecture. The study is focused around design prototyping for early stage design. Insights are synthesized from critical review of the literature: key objectives of prototyping, critical review of major techniques, relationships between techniques, and a strategy matrix to connect objectives to techniques. The review is supported with exemplar prototypes provided from industrial design efforts. Techniques are roughly categorized into those that improve the outcomes of prototyping directly, and those that enable prototyping through lowering of cost and time. Compact descriptions of each technique provide a foundation to compare the potential benefits and drawbacks of each. The review concludes with a summary of key observations, highlighted opportunities in the research, and a vision of the future of prototyping. This review aims to provide a resource for designers as well as set a trajectory for continuing innovation in the scientific research of design prototyping.
Scientific evaluation of prototyping practices is an emerging field in design research. Prototyping is critical to the success of product development efforts, and yet its implementation in practice is often guided by ad hoc experience. To address this need, we seek to advance the study and development of prototyping principles, techniques, and tools. A method to repeatedly enhance the outcome of prototyping efforts is reported in this paper. The research methodology to develop this method is as follows: (1) systematically identify practices that improve prototyping; (2) synthesize these practices to form a guiding method for designers; and (3) validate that the proposed method encourages best practices and improves performance. Prototyping practices are represented as six key heuristics to guide a designer in planning: how many iterations to pursue, how many unique design concepts to explore in parallel, as well as the use of scaled prototypes, isolated subsystem prototypes, relaxed requirements, and virtual prototypes. The method is correlated, through experimental investigation, with increased application of these best practices and improved design performance outcomes. These observations hold across various design problems studied. This method is novel in providing a systematic approach to prototyping.
Prototyping may be simultaneously one of the most important and least formally explored areas of design. Over the last few decades, designers and researchers have developed many methodologies for ideation, product architecture, design selection, and many other aspects of the design process. However, there have been relatively few methodologies published regarding the efficient and effective development of prototypes for new products. This research explores a methodology for enhancing the prototyping process. It is founded on extensive literature review of the best practices of engineering prototype development. These findings have been aggregated and form the foundation of a methodology for formulating prototyping strategies. This methodology has then been experimentally evaluated in a controlled design environment, and its effect on the performance of prototypes has been demonstrated. The method consists of a set of guiding questions with corresponding flowcharts and foundational equations that assist the designer to make choices about how to approach the prototyping process in an efficient and effective manner.
Design is a ubiquitous human activity. Design is valued by individuals, teams, organizations, and cultures. There are patterns and recurrent phenomena across the diverse set of approaches to design and also variances. Designers can benefit from leveraging conceptual tools like process models, methods, and design principles to amplify design phenomena. There are many variant process models, methods, and principles for design. Likewise, usage of these conceptual tools differentiates in industrial contexts. We present an integrated process model, with exemplar methods and design principles that is synthesized from a review of several case studies in client based industrial design projects for product, service, and system development, professional education courses, and literature review. Concepts from several branches of design practice: (1) design thinking, (2) business design, (3) systems engineering, and (4) design engineering are integrated. A design process model, method set, and set of abstracted design principles are porposed.
Design and other fundamental topics in engineering are often isolated to dedicated courses. An opportunity exists to foster a culture of engineering design and multidisciplinary problem solving throughout the curriculum. Designettes, charettelike design challenges, are rapid and creative learning tools that enable educators to integrate design learning in a single class, across courses, across terms, and across disciplines. When two or more courses join together in a designette, a multidisciplinary learning activity occurs; multiple subjects are integrated and applied to open-ended problems and grand challenges. This practice helps foster a culture of design, and enables the introduction of multidisciplinary design challenges. Studies at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) demonstrate learning of engineering subject matter in a bio-inspired robotics designette (MechAnimal), an interactive musical circuit designette, and an automated milk delivery (AutoMilk) designette. Each challenge combines problem clarification, concept generation, and prototyping with subject content such as circuits, biology, thermodynamics, differential equations, or software with controls. From pre-and postsurveys of students, designettes are found to increase students' understanding of engineering concepts. From 321 third-semester students, designettes were found to increase students' perceptions of their ability to solve multidisciplinary problems.
Design innovation projects often generate large numbers of design ideas from designers, users, and, increasingly, the crowd over the Internet. Such idea data are often used for selection and implementation but, in fact, can 1also be used as sources of inspiration for further idea generation. In particular, the elementary concepts that underlie the original ideas can be recombined to generate new ideas. But it is not a trivial task to retrieve concepts from raw lists of ideas and data sources in a manner that can stimulate or generate new ideas. A significant difficulty lies in the fact that idea data are often expressed in unstructured natural languages. This paper develops a methodology that uses natural language processing to extract key words as elementary concepts embedded in massive idea descriptions and represents the elementary concept space in a core–periphery structure to direct the recombination of elementary concepts into new ideas. We apply the methodology to mine and represent the concept space underlying massive crowdsourced ideas and use it to generate new ideas for future transportation system designs in a real public sector-sponsored project via humans and automated computer programs. Our analysis of the human and computer recombination processes and outcomes sheds light on future research directions for artificial intelligence in design ideation.
Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to play an important role in product development, and many companies are searching for how to best integrate AM into their products, business models, and design processes. Often, AM is integrated into later stages of the design process for products during manufacturing and production. However, there is an opportunity to introduce AM in early-stage design, which could spark new business models and services in addition to re-thinking manufacturing for products. The central research question for this paper is what is an appropriate and useful tool to support innovations with AM early in the design process? Prior work has extracted and validated AM design principles. This paper describes the strategic development of AM Principle Cards from these design principles. The cards are a vehicle for codified AM design principles to be shared and understood in a way that inspires learning, creativity, and AM considerations during the early stages of the design process. They implement a number of best-known practices from an inductive principle-extraction study and literature related to the use of design stimuli, learning theory, design by analogy, and creativity. The AM cards were awarded a Singapore Good Design Award (SG Mark) for 2019. The AM Principle Cards were validated in two studies. In this paper, an ideation study is conducted with 85 designers to elicit feedback about the cards’ effectiveness to explain concepts related to AM and their ability to inspire creativity and new innovations. An additional ideation study was conducted with 61 participants that showed significant improvement in quality and novelty of ideas. The full deck of the final 27 AM Principle Cards is shared for design educators and practitioners to use.
This work seeks to introduce and evaluate effects of a novel method for designing prototyping strategies. This newly developed heuristics-based tool guides designers in planning a prototyping strategy based on answers to Likert-scale questions that embody empirically validated heuristics. We created this tool to augment prior work in the development of prototyping planning methods. The new tool guides designers through six critical prototype strategy choices: (1) How many concepts should be prototyped? (2) How many iterations of a concept should be built? (3) Should the prototype be virtual or physical? (4) Should subsystems be isolated? (5) Should the prototype be scaled? (6) Should the design requirements be temporarily relaxed? We assessed the new planning tool in two environments: (1) a controlled experiment in which volunteers completed a prototyping design challenge, and (2) a capstone design class with a diverse range of open-ended sponsored design projects. In both cases, students received training for the method and then employed it in their own efforts. In our study the new tool caused student teams to employ significantly more efficient and effective prototyping strategies, such as prototyping early and often. The results indicate a higher functional performance of prototypes from groups using the new planning tool compared to control groups. This paper describes the new prototyping strategy planning tool, details both sets of experiments, and discusses results.
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