Prototypes

The mantra of Design Thinking is “make to think”. Prototyping is fundamental to Design Thinking. Rapidly iterate on prototypes, evaluate proposed solutions, gather feedback about them, and refine solution by incorporating feedback, accepting and learning from failures. Design Thinking is a continual process of iteration and refinement, building and validating prototypes in order to continually insure the design challenge will deliver value to the customer and the organization. Prototypes provide teams with the ability rapidly develop multiple solutions and how to use them to align the organization around the implications for each alternative. This section will provide you with the tools and methods for rapidly building a range of prototypes and the ability to select what type of prototype, from simple paper prototypes to complex functional systems; best meets the team’s goals. It will also give you the means for gathering feedback and refine prototypes. As well as the how to best accept and learn from the teams failures—not all the prototypes the team build will work. But even failures provide insight and value!