Welcome to The Design Loft, where we look at how to make things better through making better things. The Design Loft connects the art and craft of envisioning and making things with the science of evaluation and psychology to ensure what we make has a positive impact.
With this issue, we continue our discussion of prototypes. Prototypes are at the core of design practice. A prototype is about putting ideas into a form to learn about the fit, function, aesthetics, and possible challenges facing your designed product — whether an object, service, or concept (policy or program).
Prototyping channels creators’ ideas into courage.
I will take us deeper into prototyping and explore why we do it and how it fits with the designer’s mindset. There’s also a lot of new ideas, links and tools for you from ethnography texts, ways to envision a sustainable future and a brand new toolkit for social innovation (and more)
Elevated Ideas: Links of Interest
If, like millions of others, you use Slack at work, you probably noticed a big design change in recent weeks. Go into the mindset of the design team to learn why the changes were made, how, and what their design thinking was in this article.
Leadership is a design activity. We conceive ideas, create possible futures and take people there. The Danish innovation school Kaospilot recently looked at this idea and wants you to know the difference between leaders, leading and leadership.
SI Canada has published another incredible toolkit for social innovation. The crowdsourced, open-sourced collection of methods, tools, and techniques is free and available to help you with your next innovation venture.
How does design influence our lives? DesignTO published an essay or guide looking at the role of design in our lives and how aesthetics, composition, and craft all channel creativity into our world and make it better.
Kevin Richards has a great series on Solarpunk — creating desirable futurescapes based on science, design, art, and foresight. This approach is a stark contrast to the more dystopian visions of the future we see in other futures projects.
Kevin also convenes the remarkable Design + Critical Thinking Group, which has a wonderful resource library, including free links to useful design-related textbooks like this one on ethnographic approaches to design research.
Lesson: Prototyping And the Designer’s Mindset
Prototyping is the art and craft of transforming ideas into examples that eventually become the final product.
If you’re looking to prototype, there are a few things to consider:
Generate a lot of ideas!
Evaluate those ideas in terms of their 1) feasibility, 2) plausibility, and 3) ability to be modelled. That means looking for ideas that have the potential to be turned into viable, real products (plausible). It also means making sure the ideas can be crafted into something that has the potential to be turned into something viable and real (feasibility). The ability to be modelled means that you can take your idea and turn it into a prototype: some tangible representation of the idea.
Models are intended to be as good or as true to the idea as necessary to properly evaluate the utility, attraction, and fit of the idea. Utility means that it can be used. Attraction refers to the interest among prospective users in the idea as a potential as represented in the model. Lastly, looking at your model in terms of fit means matching what you create to the potential use cases for your ideas (e.g., market, organizational role, or situation). The more detailed your model, the more you are able to assess the closeness of fit.
Evaluate — ask questions systematically — your models based on the criteria above. Take the answers and incorporate lessons from them into next version of the prototype.
Keep prototyping until there is no more useful and actionable insights coming from your evaluations. Once you’re here, you’re ready to launch your idea into the world.
That’s how you do it. To hold this as a mindset for approaching your ideas is to set yourself up for creating the kind of models that will save you time in the long term and give you the kind of feedback that lowers the risk of failure (i.e., launching a product into the world that doesn’t achieve what it sets out to do or does harm) and increases the likelihood of success.
Stay tuned for more on this lesson in an upcoming bonus post focused on prototyping that will bring in references and examples from real-world design. This multi-part approach to the lesson is my attempt to add prototyping to The Design Loft.
What do you think? Comments are welcome. That’s evaluation in action (your feedback will be used to contribute to the next iteration).
Thanks for reading. Thoughts, comments, and sharing The Design Loft with others is always welcome.
