The Prototype Idea
Sean Moore
The prototype.
If you ever take a design class in college – and if you’re not an engineer, I have no idea why you would want to subject yourself to the high stress and the sleepless nights that come with it – you come to love the idea of the prototype.
You’re facing what seems like an insurmountable challenge: build a working, safe effective thing. Every other class has been the same routine of learn some material, practice some material, test yourself on that material, and then forget about that material for good (finals notwithstanding of course; typically, you’ll just have to cram it all in your head one last time).
Design classes are an entirely different thing. You learn something in class, and then you go work on a product that, frankly, you have no business building. You’ve never designed a working thing before; in fact, the closest you’ve ever come is building some Lego contraption over parts that have fallen off the sets that came with those neatly laid-out instructions. You’ve never done product research, or human factors analysis. You’ve never used that research to design a custom housing. You’ve never built a circuit that didn’t come with a schematic. You’ve done none of this.
What did I say it felt like? Ah yes: insurmountable.
If you imagine the process of going from some cocktail napkin sketch to finished device as happening in one step, and then you ask yourself to do that one step, of course it is going to feel insurmountable.
But what you quickly discover, is that process is anything but single-step.
Which is why the prototype is so indispensable. Here you are, this grand idea, spectacular and nubile, on the one side, and on the other is your professor telling you an idea is worth shit and how’s your device coming along and you do realize that the product is due in two months, right?
You know where you want, and you know where you want to be, but you have no idea of the direction. Enter the prototype: make something, anything – make it ugly, make it do one thing poorly. See if it is closer than what you had before, but wait, you had a silly little piece of paper and some half-cooked-up dream, so of course it’s better. Is it closer to where you want to be? If so, great, make another one and make it do a little more, or make it a little smaller, or make it stop blowing up when you press that button! If not, well, make another one anyway, but don’t do that again (and maybe let other people know what you did wrong so others can avoid it in the future).
In this way, you barely realize the progress your making, but if you pick your head up at two in the morning after a month and a half, and look at the little graveyard of terrible designs you’ve discarded, you may just realize that you’ve got a half decent product on your hands.
Now get back to work.
I bring up the prototype because there isn’t really that sort of thing in the abstract world. You have ideas on the one hand, these lofty concepts that are expressed in a word or two, and often carry a lot more meaning than they let on, at least to whoever thought them up. On the other hand are these concrete manifestations of ideas – a novel, or an article, or a manifesto, or a passive-aggressive letter pinned onto a church door.
There’s no middle ground. There’s no way to build something, anything, ugly but working in concept, and share it with the world, to see if your headed in the right direction, and what you can do to make your next one a little better.
A prototype idea. That sounds about right. Something that can fill the void between a tweet or a status update, and a blog post. Somewhere in the range of 100–250 words. Easily readable, easily understood, easily shared, and perhaps most importantly, easily changed based on feedback.
If it sounds like a silly idea, hopefully you can at least appreciate the irony that it took over 700 words to say it.