Why the prototype you think you need, might not be the answer for your hardware project.
When thinking of hardware development, we might visualise a room full of prototypes. James Dyson famously claimed to have produced 5,127 prototypes before he released the first bagless vacuum cleaner. While clearly a critical part of the process, from my experience prototypes are often fixated on as a target or milestone, rather than as a tool to reduce risk.
The vast majority of product development is a process of risk reduction. As a project develops:
– Certainty replaces uncertainty.
– Evidence replaces assumptions.
– And confidence in our product should grow!
We should, therefore, view prototypes merely as a tool to reduce risk and answer unknowns. The output of a phase of design shouldn’t be to create a prototype, but to reduce uncertainty.
With this goal in mind, the form a prototype takes may change drastically.
The most memorable prototype of my career involved a bike pump attached to an empty hot chocolate powder tub. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but within minutes, we had proven the feasibility of something which was previously not clear.
Particularly in the early stages of product development, a clear understanding of the major risks and uncertainties is critical to determining the most efficient way to make progress. More often than not, the largest risks are not technical, but based on assumptions about what users want.
In such cases, fixating on creating a highly functional, polished prototype which approximates a final product can be an incredibly expensive and time consuming way to test your product idea.
You likely already have the means necessary to reduce the risk of your early product idea without needing to invest in the creation of a sophisticated prototype. A sketch, a rudimentary model, a concept illustration can all act as a form of prototype and can be extremely effective in reducing risk before committing to technical product development.
Creative approaches to prototyping
