What the hell is “Rapid Prototyping”?
No seriously, I have no idea what it means.
This term “rapid prototyping” has been bouncing around the UX community for some time and it was making me angry so I looked it up. It’s actually a term from our friends in the manufacturing community.
According to Wikipedia, rapid prototyping is defined as group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part or assembly using three-dimensional computer aided design (CAD) data….
That means absolutely nothing to me as a digital product designer.
Seriously though, if you Google “Rapid Prototyping” you’ll see a bunch of links for manufacturing companies and such. Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.
We in the UX and Product Design community have co-opted this term, stripped it of it’s meaning and use it arbitrarily as some sort of synonym for… working quickly? That’s asinine.
In manufacturing, it can take years to do all the necessary research, gather all the materials, design the thing, and build a prototype before its ready to test. So some smart a-hole developed a system where that process doesn’t take as long. and called it rapid prototyping and everyone cheered!
I mean, anything is “rapid” compared to the old way of doing things.
Look, I don’t work in manufacturing (actually very few people in the US still do, but that’s beside the point), I work in software. Where its super easy to build a prototype in like a day using a variety of software tools! So why are we using the term “rapid prototyping”? It’s already pretty rapid…
What exactly are we comparing this to? It implies that there is an alternative — slow prototyping. I’m not aware of any design team that practices slow prototyping. That would be a waste of time and money for everyone and that is super obvious. Let’s remind ourselves what the purpose of a prototype is: to test our ideas!
History and statistics tell us that our ideas are wrong MOST of the time. So most of our prototypes will get thrown out after being invalidated. If that’s the case, why would we do anything but prototype rapidly? If you’re going to build a prototype — build it. Then test it. Then learn how bad your ideas were. Then do it again.
I guess you could do that slowly if you wanted to, but I don’t see the point. There is no such thing as “rapid prototyping.” There is only prototyping — and you should be doing it rapidly.
