The Economies and Dimensionality of Prototyping: Value, Time, Cost and Fidelity

Abstract

Economic use of early stage prototyping is of paramount importance to companies engaged in the development of innovative products, services and systems because it directly impacts their bottom-line [1, 2]. There is likewise a need to understand the dimensions and lenses that make up an economic profile of prototypes. Yet, there is no reliable understanding of how resources expended and views of dimensionality across prototyping translate into value [3, 4]. To help practitioners, designers, and researchers leverage prototyping most economically, we seek to understand the tradeoff between design information gained and the resource expended into prototyping to gain that information [5]. We investigate this topic by conducting an inductive study on industry projects across disciplines and knowledge domains, while collecting and analyzing empirical data on their physical prototyping process [3]. Our research explores ways of quantifying prototyping value and reinforcing the asymptotic relationship between value and fidelity [6]. Most intriguingly, it reveals insightful heuristics that practitioners can exploit to generate high value from low and high fidelity prototypes alike.

Descriptive Models of Sequential Decisions in Engineering Design: An Experimental Study

“…Because this study utilizes student population and a shortrun decision-making process, more empirical evidence is required to establish the generalizability of the results to engineers as designers and long-term design processes. Future descriptive modeling efforts need to account for context-dependent design situations, where decision strategies depend on the availability of problem-specific information or the lack thereof [44], an acceptable quantification of predictive uncertainty is absent [45], and the mapping between resources expended and the value of prototypes created varies across disciplines and knowledge domains [46]. Such design situations should include multiple objectives and/or multidimensional design parameters.…”

Lens Application: Mobile Application Using Augmented Reality

“…Designing low fidelity prototype known as low-tech, is a simple and easy translation of the product and design concepts. It's used to turn the design ideas into testable and tangible artifacts, collecting and analyzing the user demands at the early stage [29]. It involves :…”

“…See Figure 3 Designing high fidelity prototype to help users to look and feel how the application interface will be. Prototypes help in examining design problems and evaluating solutions [29].…”

Kids’ Atlas application to Learn about Geography and Maps

“…It is the basis from which the design ideas are transformed into testable and tangible things. Such a prototype enables the user's requirements to be collected and analyzed early on in the project's development (Tiong et al, 2018).…”

“…High-fidelity prototypes give users an indication of what the final interface product will look and feel. Prototypes help to identify problems and their potential solutions (Tiong et al, 2018).…”