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 is often a very important phase in a capstone engineering design project.However, in many cases, prototyping decisions are made arbitrarily by students, adversely affecting the quality of the final product delivered. Previous research efforts at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a structured prototyping strategy tool based on a synthesis of prototyping techniques that have been shown to be effective. This strategy tool leads designers through the process of making decisions about aspects of a prototype program, such as how many concepts to prototype, the number of prototype iterations to complete for a given concept, and whether to use scaled prototypes. In this study the effect of explicit discussion of these prototyping decisions on the results of the capstone design projects was evaluated. Research suggests that early and frequent prototyping leads to increases in the quality and the novelty of designs. Therefore, the goal of this project was to determine if exposure to the prototyping strategy tool leads to vii an increase in the number of prototypes constructed. At the beginning of the semester, students in the capstone course received instruction on the benefits of prototyping and on the use of the prototyping strategy tool. Interviews were conducted at the end of the semester to evaluate the students' prototyping efforts. These results were compared to previous capstone projects where the students did not receive formal guidance on making prototyping decisions. The results of the comparison show statistically significant increases in the proportion of teams opting to create prototypes and the average number of prototypes per team. This thesis describes the study in detail, analyzes the results, and presents conclusions and future directions for the research.viii List of Tables CHAPTER 1: THESIS OVERVIEWThis thesis contains the research findings from a study to determine the effects of exposure of capstone design students to a well-defined prototyping strategy development tool.Prototyping has long been recognized as one of the most important stages of the product development process (1). Prototyping is the process of generating an initial manifestation of a design concept during the phases of concept generation and design verification.The product development process often constitutes a huge investment which must be offset by creation of a successful end product. From a financial standpoint it is very important that time and money invested in product development yields a successful product which can be launched into the market. However, an analysis of R&D spending finds that about 40-60% of R&D investment is lost in developing products which are never launched in the market or which do not yield adequate returns (2). The study also suggests that effective prototyping decisions (e.g. how many concepts to prototype simultaneously, how many iterations to pursue for a particular design concept) are critical aspects of a product development process and its success.When a design is p...
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