Thoughts: On [Rapid] Prototyping

When you have an idea pop in your head, rapid prototyping is a good way of getting that idea into an object you can toss around. It doesn’t have to be fully functional – even barely functional may be good enough. This note is about two stories regarding prototyping (rapid, in that the objects were hardly functional and focused on look and feel).

The first story is that which Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot PDA) used to tell – about creating a bunch of prototypes in his spare time – on his kitchen table. In an in-between approach – whenever there was an idea and spare time.

The second story (the one that stands out the most in this book) is from page 387 of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson where Tony Fadell sequentially reveals styrofoam models of prospective designs. Upshot is that this approach enabled an instant decision in one meeting instead of a drawn out status quo over many meetings.

The second one is the