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.
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