- Design today requires the ability for teams
to rapidly explore ideas and communicate with others.
Without the ability
to rapidly prototype new user experiences,
most teams and companies are not able to keep up
with the rapid pace of market change.
Prototyping has always been a part of the design process.
In the industrial revolution,
prototyping and experimentation
transformed society with innovations like the steam engine.
However, like those trains,
these prototypes were big, slow, and costly to create.
At the start of the digital age,
this sped up when designers started experimenting
with off-the-shelf parts
to quickly explore the possibilities of new technologies.
For example, the first Atari console
was actually built from arcade game parts
and the introduction of cheap transistor technology
created new forms of music
by inventors like Bob Moog,
both of which transformed markets.
Today, industry moves at light speed
with a mantra of fail fast and fail often
because we have so many tools at our disposal
to quickly try ideas
to unlock new opportunities and markets.
And if your team isn't using these tools
to move at that pace,
you know your competitors and hungry startups are.
So how can prototyping be used most effectively
in your business?
How can it accelerate your business today?
The good news is that prototyping
has become more rapid, accessible, and less expensive.
And you can learn to use these tools
and collaborate with technologists
to accelerate the creation of new ideas
and elegant solutions to complex problems.
When you make prototyping part of your design thinking team
to make frequent design experiments together,
you'll change your world.
So prototyping no longer needs to be big, slow, and costly,
rather a revolution has emerged that makes small, fast,
and lightweight prototyping possible.
And now it's possible within design thinking.