Rapid Prototyping- An Interactive Approach

The desire to do work for grassroots startups leads a successful agency to the question: "What if we offered a condensed version of our process?"

                                                                                                            -Kevin Menzie-

One of the biggest challenges experienced by designers is that they struggle to offer a condensed version of the product and get their clients adopt their ideas. The clients ask for the evidence that design will succeed. To cater this problem, the most radical and bold solution is to create a ‘Rapid Prototype’. And this is where rapid prototyping comes in, taking lead in the design industry and influencing the business relationship between the clients and the designer.

Rapid prototyping- an iterative approach, uses interface design in quickly imitating up the future state of the system. Rapid prototyping can mean the difference between quickly finding your path to the successful product and toiling away for months. Rapid prototyping- an iterative approach, the process generates a set of data emulated as a ‘Prototype’. Executing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process thus, improving the final design, minimizing need for changes and enhancing client and designer relationships.

Rapid prototyping has revolutionized the industrial manufacturing technology in the recent times, which allows direct transformation of CAD files into functional prototypes. Additionally, it has tremendously reduced lead time to produce physical prototypes necessary for design verification. Thus, in product development, rapid prototyping and rapid product development have turned out to be the key players in saving time and money for the development of innovative products. Moreover, rapid prototyping leads to a better and faster design where it facilitates the visual models, experimenting with innovative blend of ideas and avoiding missed requirements.

A rapid prototyping process is a three step closed loop process which operates in a cyclic manner. Firstly, step prototype helps to covert user’s instructions and descriptions into mock ups employing best experiences, standards and practices. Secondly, the review step of the prototype is the evaluation phase to check whether it meets the desired conditions and expectations. Finally, step refine which is entirely based on the feedback highlights room for the improvement thus, identifying areas of refinement and clarity. The prototype grows in breadth and depth over multiple iterations until the prototype transforms to the finalized and finished product.

One of the unexpected benefits of rapid prototyping is improvement in the impact of a design process on the relationship between the designer and the client. The design discipline which deals with formal design education largely focusses on the end user relationship.  The science of rapid prototyping has introduced another core discipline of ‘Intervention Design’, the formal thought process of designing intervention thus, enhancing the quality and probability of the final design. The emerging discipline with rapid prototyping as its major tool will bolster the role of design in process manufacturing and will also highlights the role of designer and end client relationship in design manufacturing process.

Let the prototyping stage to use all your untapped creative abilities and explore all the opportunities in the market.