Prototyping

Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

Now in its second edition, Prototyping and Modelmaking for Product Design, by practising product development consultant Bjarki Hallgrimsson, is essential reading for both students and design professionals. Prototyping and ModelMaking for Product Design goes behind the scenes to illustrates how prototypes are used to help designers understand problems better, explore more imaginative solutions, investigate human interaction more fully and test functionality so as to de-risk the design process. Following an introduction on the purpose of prototyping, specific materials, tools and techniques are examined in detail, with step-by-step tutorials and industry examples of real and successful products illustrating how prototypes are used to help solve design problems. Workflow is also discussed, using a mixture of hands-on and digital tools. This new edition includes case studies representing technological developments such as prototyping user experience and interactive electronic products, as well as a new expanded section on digital modelmaking tools, including 3D printing and laser cutting. The first chapters of the book explain why prototyping is so important to the design process. The many uses of prototyping will be shown in the context of several comprehensive projects by some of the world's leading design firms. The second part is an introduction to the typical materials used by designers in their prototyping efforts and how to work with them. In all cases, the approach is to use digital and manual tools in a complementary and effective fashion. Tutorials were specifically developed that underline the back and forth of digital and manual ways of working. The emphasis is on the kinds of construction that can be done by the designers themselves. Health and safety is stressed in terms of personal responsibility and awareness. Topics covered include:Definition of prototyping and modelmakingPrototyping as a form of problem solvingModelmakingPhysical and digital prototypesBuidling by hand and using digital technologies

Prototyping and user testing is the best way to create successful products, but many designers skip this important step and use gut instinct instead. By explaining the goals and methodologies behind prototyping—and demonstrating how to prototype for both physical and digital products—this practical guide helps beginning and intermediate designers become more comfortable with creating and testing prototypes early and often in the process. Author Kathryn McElroy explains various prototyping methods, from fast and dirty to high fidelity and refined, and reveals ways to test your prototypes with users. You’ll gain valuable insights for improving your product, whether it’s a smartphone app or a new electronic gadget. Learn similarities and differences between prototyping for physical and digital products Know what fidelity level is needed for different prototypes Get best practices for prototyping in a variety of mediums, and choose which prototyping software or components to use Learn electronics prototyping basics and resources for getting started Write basic pseudocode and translate it into usable code for Arduino Conduct user tests to gain insights from prototypes

Do you spend a lot of time during the design process wondering what users really need? Do you hate those endless meetings where you argue how the interface should work? Have you ever developed something that later had to be completely redesigned? Paper Prototyping can help. Written by a usability engineer with a long and successful paper prototyping history, this book is a practical, how-to guide that will prepare you to create and test paper prototypes of all kinds of user interfaces. You'll see how to simulate various kinds of interface elements and interactions. You'll learn about the practical aspects of paper prototyping, such as deciding when the technique is appropriate, scheduling the activities, and handling the skepticism of others in your organization. Numerous case studies and images throughout the book show you real world examples of paper prototyping at work. Learn how to use this powerful technique to develop products that are more useful, intuitive, efficient, and pleasing: * Save time and money - solve key problems before implementation begins * Get user feedback early - use it to focus the development process * Communicate better - involve development team members from a variety of disciplines * Be more creative - experiment with many ideas before committing to one *Enables designers to solve design problems before implementation begins *Five case studies provide real world examples of paper prototyping at work *Delves into the specifics of what types of projects paper prototyping is and isn't good for.

Effective Prototyping for Software Makers is a practical, informative resource that will help anyone—whether or not one has artistic talent, access to special tools, or programming ability—to use good prototyping style, methods, and tools to build prototypes and manage for effective prototyping. This book features a prototyping process with guidelines, templates, and worksheets; overviews and step-by-step guides for nine common prototyping techniques; an introduction with step-by-step guidelines to a variety of prototyping tools that do not require advanced artistic skills; templates and other resources used in the book available on the Web for reuse; clearly-explained concepts and guidelines; and full-color illustrations and examples from a wide variety of prototyping processes, methods, and tools. This book is an ideal resource for usability professionals and interaction designers; software developers, web application designers, web designers, information architects, information and industrial designers. * A prototyping process with guidelines, templates, and worksheets; * Overviews and step-by-step guides for 9 common prototyping techniques; * An introduction with step-by-step guidelines to a variety of prototyping tools that do not require advanced artistic skills; * Templates and other resources used in the book available on the Web for reuse; * Clearly-explained concepts and guidelines; * Full-color illustrations, and examples from a wide variety of prototyping processes, methods, and tools. * www.mkp.com/prototyping

In this book, the authors describe the findings derived from interaction and cooperation between scientific actors employing diverse practices. They reflect on distinct prototyping concepts and examine the transformation of development culture in their fusion to hybrid approaches and solutions. The products of tomorrow are going to be multifunctional, interactive systems – and already are to some degree today. Collaboration across multiple disciplines is the only way to grasp their complexity in design concepts. This underscores the importance of reconsidering the prototyping process for the development of these systems, particularly in transdisciplinary research teams. “Rethinking Prototyping – new hybrid concepts for prototyping” was a transdisciplinary project that took up this challenge. The aim of this programmatic rethinking was to come up with a general concept of prototyping by combining innovative prototyping concepts, which had been researched and developed in three sub-projects: “Hybrid Prototyping” developed new prototyping approaches to validate and evaluate holistically developed systems with their services, infrastructure and business models. “Blended Prototyping” addressed a new technique whereby prototypes for user interfaces of software applications can be generated from hand drawings and immediately be tested. “Beyond Prototyping” examined the issue of the prototype in connection with algorithmically generated design for producing tailor-made products.

Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has been engaged in the conception and manufacture of discrete products to serve the functional needs of local customers and the tools (technology) needed by other craftsmen. In fact, much of the progress in civilization can be attributed to progress in discrete product manufacture. The functionality of a discrete object depends on two entities: form, and material composition. For instance, the aesthetic appearance of a sculpture depends upon its form whereas its durability depends upon the material composition. An ideal manufacturing process is one that is able to automatically generate any form (freeform) in any material. However, unfortunately, most traditional manufacturing processes are severely constrained on all these counts. There are three basic ways of creating form: conservative, subtractive, and additive. In the first approach, we take a material and apply the needed forces to deform it to the required shape, without either adding or removing material, i. e. , we conserve material. Many industrial processes such as forging, casting, sheet metal forming and extrusion emulate this approach. A problem with many of these approaches is that they focus on form generation without explicitly providing any means for controlling material composition. In fact, even form is not created directly. They merely duplicate the external form embedded in external tooling such as dies and molds and the internal form embedded in cores, etc. Till recently, we have had to resort to the 'subtractive' approach to create the form of the tooling.

Prototyping and user testing is the best way to create successful products, but many designers skip this important step and use gut instinct instead. By explaining the goals and methodologies behind prototyping—and demonstrating how to prototype for both physical and digital products—this practical guide helps beginning and intermediate designers become more comfortable with creating and testing prototypes early and often in the process. Author Kathryn McElroy explains various prototyping methods, from fast and dirty to high fidelity and refined, and reveals ways to test your prototypes with users. You’ll gain valuable insights for improving your product, whether it’s a smartphone app or a new electronic gadget. Learn similarities and differences between prototyping for physical and digital products Know what fidelity level is needed for different prototypes Get best practices for prototyping in a variety of mediums, and choose which prototyping software or components to use Learn electronics prototyping basics and resources for getting started Write basic pseudocode and translate it into usable code for Arduino Conduct user tests to gain insights from prototypes