Chapter Seven: Believe It When You See It
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a workshop filled with prototypesof new products.
During my first semester of college, I was given an informal tour of the industrial design modeling shop at Carnegie Mellon University. In the subbasement of an academic building was a huge room lined with table saws, band saws, planers, sanders, and drill presses. Next to the shop were a painting booth and a room for assembling constructions.What I would see created in this space over the next few months amazed me; industrial design students were using wood and foam to build beautiful models of toys, kitchen appliances, table lamps, and other products.
In my eyes, these objects were beautiful not because I agreed with every aesthetic choice the designers had made, but because they looked so real—they allowed me to understand their shapes, colors, and textures, and to imagine myself using them. A model of a toy had brightly colored surfaces that looked just like the plastic materialthat was proposed for the toy, and I could understand how the parts of the toy fit together and how a child might play with it. All of this information was available to me through a model—a carefully constructed but cheap and flimsy version of the proposed design.
These models weren’t used to specify fabrication of the finished products. In product design, the purpose of a model is to transformpages of written specifications and two-dimensional sketches into a three-dimensional object so that designer, marketer, manufacturer,and consumer can reach a consensus on a common vision—quickly, accurately, and, most importantly, affordably.
An industrial designer who models the interior of a new automobileand an architect who constructs a scale model of a building are doing the same thing. Each provides a necessarily diverse audience of professionals who participate in a product’s development with a cost-effective, meaningful method of evaluating a design well in advance of its production, at a stage when revisions, updates, and other options can still be explored. But in software development, something very different happens. Because designers and their modeling abilities are not typically resident within the software development process, developers are left to create prototypes. The outcome isn’t nearly as successful.
