The Economies and Dimensionality of Design Prototyping: Value, Time, Cost, and Fidelity
Name
md_141_03_031105.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
6.76 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
89d48f70a9794c5abb612daa0a439adf
Author(s)
Tiong, Edward
Seow, Olivia
Camburn, Bradley
Teo, Kenneth
Silva, Arlindo
Wood, Kristin
Jensen, Daniel D.
Yang, Maria C.
Date Issued
January 2019
Journal
Journal of Mechanical Design
Publisher
ASME International
Citation
Tiong, Edward et al. "The Economies and Dimensionality of Design Prototyping: Value, Time, Cost, and Fidelity." Journal of Mechanical Design 141, 3 (January 2019): 031105 © 2018 ASME
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Economic use of early-stage prototyping is of paramount importance to companies engaged in the development of innovative products, services, and systems because it directly impacts their bottom line. There is likewise a need to understand the dimensions, and lenses that make up an economic profile of prototypes. Yet, there is little reliable understanding of how resources expended and views of dimensionality across prototyping translate into value. To help practitioners, designers, and researchers leverage prototyping most economically, we seek to understand the tradeoff between design information gained through prototyping and the resources expended prototyping. We investigate this topic by conducting an inductive study on industry projects across disciplines and knowledge domains while collecting and analyzing empirical data on their prototype creation and test processes. Our research explores ways of quantifying prototyping value and reinforcing the asymptotic relationship between value and fidelity. Most intriguingly, the research reveals insightful heuristics that practitioners can exploit to generate high value from low and high fidelity prototypes alike.
MIT Department
SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4042337
