• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Process Cat

Where Makers Become Manufacturers.

  • Home
  • About
  • Book
    • My Account
    • Checkout
    • Cart
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Blog
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Design Thinking 3: Prototyping and Testing

Written by: M.G. Rhoads
2020-11-03 ·

Rhonda's excited about her new product Prototyping idea!

You’re excited to make a new product.  You’ve followed the first few steps of the Design Thinking process.  (If you haven’t? Start by reading the first and second) articles in this series to learn about those.)  

Now it’s time for, in my opinion, the two most fun steps of the whole process: prototyping and testing!

Prototyping

A prototype, sometimes called a mockup, is a “rough draft” of your product.  If you’ve been following along, you know that Rhonda’s product is a Secret Beer Mug.  She wants to make something she can drink beer out of, that doesn’t LOOK like a beer mug.  She also wants to make it out of wood, since that’s what her skill set is.  Here are a few of the ideas she came up with:

Rhonda's Gnome and House notes to use before Prototyping
Rhonda chose the Gnome and House ideas to prototype.

You will have chosen 2-3 of your best ideas as described in the last article.  Now you’re going to think about what factors you’ll need to figure out for your product.  

In Rhonda’s case, she needs to figure out water-tightness for both ideas.  For the gnome she’ll also need to figure out whether a 3D carving tool will in fact be capable of making what she envisions.

Rhonda visiting a local Maker Space to use a 3K-carving tool to crate her Prototype.

Rhonda doesn’t have a 3D-carving tool in her garage workshop, so she visits a local Maker Space that has one. There she’s able to take a lesson on how to use the 3D carver. She also gets some advice from the instructor on what the machine is and isn’t capable of doing.  Then she rents time on the machine and tests out some of the cuts she’ll need to make for the Gnome.  Then she makes a mockup version of what she wants the gnome to look like.

First attempts probably will need more work! This is why we like Prototyping!
Your first attempt probably won’t be perfect!

In that case, the “prototyping” and “testing” were really one step since the whole thing being tested was the feasibility of making the product using available technologies.  But in other cases you’ll do the prototyping and testing as two separate steps.

Testing

There are many things you’ll want to test with your new product.  How do various aspects of your design function, how useable is the product, do people seem interested in buying it, etc.  

Rhonda needs to test how well her designs will hold beer, for example.  So she makes mockup versions of the liquid-holding aspect of her two designs and designs a test to see how well they perform.

Rhonda's prototypes

For the first test, Rhonda simply filled both prototypes with water to see how well they held it.  She checked every 15 minutes for the first hour, then every hour for a few hours, and then left them overnight. And what she found will BLOW YOUR MIND!!!

Just kidding.  She found that they both worked ok but one of them worked better than the other. Which is probably exactly what you would have guessed. Anyway, that brings us to the end of Prototyping and Testing.  Come back next time to learn about Iteration!

Weekly Challenge:

Figure out what aspects of your product you’ll need to prototype, and get to it!  Make your first prototype TODAY if you can.

Related Posts

  • What You Need to know about Design Thinking
    What You Need to know about Design Thinking
  • Design Thinking 2: How to Use Ideation in Your Business
  • Going Over A Manufacturing Case Study

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Design Thinking, Prototyping

Primary Sidebar

Newsletter

Sign up for updates and get a FREE MINICOMIC!

Subscribe to Process Cat updates (biweekly) and get a free 4-page minicomic about Process Cat's good friend, Sebastian the engineer grizzly bear!
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
A graphic novel about plastics

Search the site

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Latest Posts

You don’t care about experiments. You’re a maker (or inventor, creator, entrepreneur, or however you describe yourself.)  If you wanted to be a lab scientist, you’d be one.  You just want to make high-quality products and sell them to your delighted customers while making a good profit. Yes that’s fair.  Not everyone finds experiments fun […]

If you’ve been following along, you know that there are some things called First Principles. These are laws of nature, just like the familiar law of gravity, but they govern the way that heat and other forms of energy work in our universe. If you’ve been following along you also know that Gary has been […]

You’re excited about your idea for a new product! Now you want to run it through some quick screens to make sure it’s at least not violating any First Principles before you move on to the Prototyping and Testing phases. Don’t know what any of these things are?  You might want to read about Design […]

Copyright © 2021 · Thinking Cape Comics · Development by Cipher