CONCEPTING & PROTOTYPING
CONCEPTING & PROTOTYPING
As part of the innovation process, you will come across many different ideas, some of which will be better than others. In terms of innovation in business, proof of concept refers to demonstrating the feasibility of an idea. The purpose of this is to show that a concept or new idea has the potential to be utilised in a practical and successful way.
If an idea can be proven as a viable concept, it moves to the prototyping stage. This part of the innovation process involves developing and building an actual working model or representation of an idea. A prototype can be a complete, full scale, functional model or may simply demonstrate a small component of an overall idea. Prototypes may or may not be designed to look like the final product, depending on the scope of the design.
Our prototypes start with the very rough (“just enough prototyping”) and progressively become more refined: from the conceptual prototypes that only convey an idea, to the functional ones that test the interactivity.
There are 3 main types of prototypes:
- Appearance prototypes: dynamic, visual, three-dimensional and environmental representations of what a product, service or application may look like. As opposed to a functional prototype, most functions actually don’t work, but their look and feel is simulated. Appearance prototypes or models are used to evaluate the initial customer experience or reaction, in-store experiences and to refine aspects of colour and material choices. Together with functional prototypes they are used for stage-gate evaluations in a business decision-making process.
- Conceptual prototypes: they can be interactive and enable us to test user acceptance, usage benefits and drawbacks by people in various contexts. They may take the form of paper, video, software or three-dimensional prototypes. These visual representations help to explain the concepts vision to various stakeholders – clients, users and colleagues.
- Functional prototypes: models or software solutions to demonstrate product or service functionalities and to test these before committing the project for further development. Three-dimensional modelling and prototyping fosters informal communication between the designers and engineers about technical
feasibility of the concept products.
