I just watched Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit, about the role of an industrial designer in the mind-blowing process of mass-producing everyday objects. While the film is about industrial design, it presented a practice and term that we interactive designers should embrace and use: prototype design.

Below: Trailer for Objectified

Industrial designers approach product design in an iterative manner (much like software designers). They may design with the hopes of creating a single manufacture-ready prototype, but they all know they’ll blow through a number of them before arriving at the right thing. They seem to accept as a class of designers they will undoubtedly ‘get it wrong’ to some degree. So their design process is experimental. And their companies and clients seemingly accept this. They have deadlines and budgets that restrict the amount of experimentation, reform, and refinement, but it is understood that a functional prototype must be perfected before moving to manufacturing. While we interactive designers go through a similar dynamic that is just as essential, we don’t have a great word for it nor do our clients or counterparts have much patience for it.

As interactive designers, our marketing clients have different expectations. They ask us to create websites and apps as extensions of larger marketing campaigns. They expect us to operate like their other marketing service vendors, firms that design communications that can be proofed before they are developed and distributed. And our development partners expect us to get it right because they are always under insane pressure to hit those deadlines regardless of how little time they are left with after a long, delayed approval process.

Some agencies utilize a “Waterfall” process to limit change and protect profitability only to restrict change too much, limiting experimentation. Other agencies say they use the “Agile” process that encourages change and optimization but also leads to scope creep and missed deadlines. And almost all agencies end up abandoning their process of choice somewhere around the second missed milestone and start reacting to the chaos and endless revision cycles that break client confidence.

Interactive design is more akin to industrial design than graphic/communication design – we create user experiences. And just like industrial designers, we will ‘get it wrong’ to a degree. No process can protect us all from our human limitations. So we must all shift paradigms. We must begin to view our initial builds as ‘prototypes’ that will require reform, not as staging links that need refinement. And those who are client-facing must actively work to reshape our clients’ expectations of our process and our milestone deliverables – a word like ‘prototype’ may just help do it.

Prototype Design Process:

Designers discover a need to improve a product. In this case it was the peeler which existed as a crude, bare metal object – no consideration for its user’s comfort.

The design team identifies sources of inspiration including this rubber bicycle handle.

The designers produce a prototype based on the inspiration to test usability.

They create dozens more in order to optimize for production.

They finally settle on a prototype that will lead the final production design.

The final production design is created.

The product is produced.

The product is used as intended.