Efficacious prototyping for early stage industrial design: understanding what matters in prototyping to make prototyping matter more

At the E&PDE 2019 conference (Image credits: Carolina Gill)

This September, I had the fortune to present research from my final year masters project at NC State University at the Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE) conference 2019 in Glasgow. Prof. Kelly Umstead and Prof. Carolina Gill were my awesome advisers and mentors for this project.

It was awesome to hear about really interesting studies and projects being done by researchers from across the world. Some of of the many interesting areas people were researching included unique tools and frameworks developed for design education, experimental projects to help students empathize more deeply with users, and design ethics. Walking around and experiencing Glasgow itself was also a lot of fun!

The research for this project aimed at understanding prototyping in the context of early stage industrial design - what prototyping means to different creatives, how it is done and how the different tools and methods used shape the underlying process. This was to try to understand the needs from the prototyping process in an evolving landscape of design, and to inform the development of new prototyping tools.

I learned a lot through this project. Particularly since I was designing for designers, I had the chance to directly reflect on and study the design process. A lot of my learning from early stage research came full circle later on in the project during design development stages to inform and inspire methods to prototype complex ideas. The design developed for this project was a visualization tool to enable interdisciplinary design teams to effectively share ideas. You can have a look at the project using the link below.