Prototyping is the shorthand of innovation

Design Management Journal, Summer 2001 by Kelley, Tom

It was the pathway to discovering the structure of DNA. It was an early approach to understanding supersonic flight. It was the design source for Apple's first computer

mouse. Taking on the role of storyteller, Tom Kelley narrates parables that joyfully share his insights on the value of prototyping. He offers many lessons that together make it abundantly clear that creative epiphanies and model building go hand in hand.1

The problem seemed insurmountable. We'd designed some new goggles for snowboarders, but weren't sure if our sleeker, face-hugging style would stay fog-free in the freezing conditions found on most ski slopes. We needed to test the goggles in the wild. But it was the middle of summer in sunny California. Our client at Smith Sports Optics didn't have the time or the budget to fly us down to New Zealand, where it's winter in July.

We couldn't wait five months for winter to come around, but there was another possibility. Two blocks south of IDEO's Palo Alto offices stands a classic family-run ice cream factory. The folks at Peninsula Creamery thought us a bit crazy when we floated our wild request for a nontraditional use of their industrial-size freezers, but as long as we didn't eat all the ice cream, why should they care?

Industrial design studio head Paul Bradley and a handful of team members bundled up in parkas and long johns. The exercise bike and fan (to simulate wind) were found by tapping out an e-mail (the way all sorts of unusual requests get filled at IDEO). Since nearly everyone at IDEO is a bike enthusiast, it wasn't hard finding volunteers to pedal for an hour in an ice cream freezer, as observers snapped photos of their perspiring faces and, fortunately, not-too-foggy prototype goggles.

Prototyping is problem solving. It's a culture

and a language. You can prototype just about anything-a new product or service, or a special promotion. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal.

Not wasting time.

The water's rising

Prototyping is a state of mind. Think of the best moviemakers. We don't idolize them just because they strike us as glamorous players in a profession filled with beautiful people. They're also people who get things done. People who make movies prototype every day, just to get by. Consider the following story. Larry Shubert of IDEO worked for a few months on the set of the underwater thriller The Abyss. If you haven't seen it, all you need to know is that most of the movie happens beneath two thousand feet of water. That critical fact forced the Abyss team, led by Titanic director James Cameron, to seek out a gigantic body of water to film the action. A pool wouldn't do, but what about a half-finished nuclear power plant in South Carolina? The main containment vessel was a tremendous 250 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep. Cameron turned it into the world's largest freshwater tank-almost 7 million gallons. This being a film, there wasn't time to plan. There was also no time to build scaffolding, so parts of the interior set were created literally as the water poured in, with workers in rowboats furiously painting the walls as the water rose.

That's the right metaphor. No matter your business, no matter your experience, odds are the water's rising. You don't have time, and if you don't act soon, you-or your project-will be underwater. There probably isn't time to do things the regular way-to do them by the book.

When Shubert and a couple of other IDEO folks were told they were flying to South Carolina to work on The Abyss, they suddenly realized they'd be working underwater and needed to be scuba-certified. One problem: The scuba course was going to take weeks. "We said, `There just isn't enough time,"' Shubert recalls. "`We'll go through the books on our own."' After a little negotiation, they made a deal with the scuba instructor. Shubert and the others read the books, did the dives, and passed the test-in a couple of days instead of a few weeks.

Kid stuff

Many of us first learned about prototyping as kids, doing class projects or finding ways to help pass those long summer afternoons. My brother David, for example, has been building things and then trying to make them better for as long as I can remember. We had a snowy Ohio winter the year I was six years old, and David started a series of increasingly complex snow construction projects in the backyard. He started with the basics-three-tiered snowmen-but soon progressed to whole forts by lining up snowmen shoulder-to-shoulder to form four walls.

Looking for the next revision of his prototype fort, David briefly considered a two-story model, which he-luckily for us-abandoned when he hit upon the idea of using a cardboard box to make snow "bricks." We were industriously building snow fort 2.0 with our adobe-style construction techniques when David hit upon an idea for revision 2.1: adding water to each brick so that it would freeze to a solid (and incredibly heavy) block of ice, which David hoped might help the fort last until Memorial Day.