Prototyping: the mother of invention

Humans have been prototyping for centuries. The realisation of every idea or dream has involved prototyping along its journey to becoming reality.

In this article, I explore why it’s important to prototype. I’ll be looking at how the tools that we have used over the years have changed how we design digital products. And I’ll give you my view of how prototyping is evolving to help us build the products of the future.

Let’s start by defining what prototyping is. According to the Cambridge dictionary prototyping is:

“a first full-scale and usually functional form of a new type or design of a construction.”

Wikipedia has this to say:

A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process.[1] It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to evaluate a new design to enhance precision by system analysts and users.[2] Prototyping serves to provide specifications for a real, working system rather than a theoretical one.[3] In some design workflow models, creating a prototype (a process sometimes called materialization) is the step between the formalization and the evaluation of an idea.[4]

Prototyping back in history

The idea of prototyping dates back many centuries in human history where inventors would create working scale models to help them explore and experiment. Leonardo Da Vinci is now almost more famous for inventions than he is for his art. Leonardo explored many ideas that have since become a reality today such as airplanes, parachutes, tanks, and even robots!

If you look at the Wright brothers who through an iterative process of trial and error finally created the first the aeroplane which by definition was the prototype. In this case, the Wright brothers were not working on a scale model but the real thing, we could compare this to the early days of software program testing where developers simply built a version of the software and then iterated on it. At the bleeding…