How many business tools does it take to change the world?
Just one. And it’s not a software package or a trendy management theory. The simple act of making a prototype could transform your company’s bottom line
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read on many levels but Richard Eisermann, director of strategic design agency Prospect, sees it, in part, as a parable about the perils of a flawed prototyping process.
“The user testing went particularly awry on that one,” he says. If Victor Frankenstein had made a rough working model of his monster and invited feedback, he might have spared much heartache.
It’s a lesson that too few companies have learned even today. “If a picture paints a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures,” says Eisermann.
“Even seductive computer renderings never really give you the tactile sensations of a prototype. It requires much less of a leap of imagination than an illustration or, God forbid, a verbal description of the idea.”
Used correctly, a prototype can refine a product or a service, sell ideas to hard-nosed sceptics (inside or outside the company) and cut the time it takes you to get to market.
“For relatively little cost, they reveal issues you can never anticipate,” says Eisermann. “Once steel is cut and a thousand lines of code generated, turning back becomes costly and time consuming. Paper, foam and wood can all be easily modified and replaced, for little money.”
And even if they prove that your revolutionary new idea is as ill-conceived as the pat on the back machine patented in 1986 by an optimistic American inventor, you’re still ahead of the game. The axiom is ‘Fail often, succeed soonest.’
2001 Apple design team
Initially, when the digerati heard Apple wanted to launch a digital music player they were puzzled.
Did the world really need another MP3 player?
Team leader Anthony Fadell made models out of foam-core boards – even using fishing weights to give his prototype the right feel and to confound the cynics.
The iPod was sparked by the launch of Apple’s iTunes software, when staff formed a low opinion of the MP3 players they were using.
c.3000 BC A Mesopotamian
The first letter of the alphabet started as a pictogram illustrating the head and horns of an ox. Phoenician scribes, who wrote right to left, drew the pictogram sideways, with the apex of the A pointing left because it was quicker. The Greeks, who usually wrote left to right, had the apex of the A pointing right. The Boustrophedon script, in which alternate lines read in opposite directions, confused things even more. By 500 BC the A was standardised in the form we know today.
1916 Gustav Lindenthal
When the Hell Gate Bridge first spanned New York’s east river, it was the longest single-arch span the world had ever seen. This marvel of civil engineering was the prototype for Sydney Harbour Bridge. The design of Sydney’s epic bridge is disputed between Ralph Freeman, an English engineer, and J.J.C. Bradfield, an Australian engineer. Freeman even accused Bradfield of tracing Hell Gate Bridge in the tender documents, a charge Bradfield vehemently denied.
1830 Charles Babbage
The principles of the computer were defined not by an IBM engineer but by the irascible English scientist Charles Babbage. His Analytical Engine was a universal calculator which could be programmed by punch cards, had a store of information (memory) and a calculating engine (processing power). Babbage was so irritable – he detested humanity in general and organ grinders in particular – no one would pay him to make one. (It didn’t help that he tinkered obsessively with his designs.) In desperation, he tried to devise a foolproof system for betting on horses. Not until 1944 did IBM finish what Babbage had started.
1950 Leo Fender
Rock’n’roll wouldn’t have been as raucous, energetic or musical without Leo Fender. After years repairing stringed instruments, Fender felt he knew how an electric guitar should look, feel and sound. So he used different woods (the neck was made of the kind of maple used in bowling pins), made it easy to make and repair and designed a new bridge pick-up so the player could generate a louder, brighter sound. The first model, the Esquire, sold for £191,000 at auction.
1928 Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Starting life as sketches of mice around a photo of Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse was designed to be as wistful as Chaplin. MGM rejected the idea, fearing a giant mouse on screen might scare pregnant women. A bit of a rogue in his first film Plane Crazy (1928), Mickey later became sweeter and more popular. The first great toon hero, sometime in the 1980s his name mysteriously became a pejorative term for anything amateurish or small-time. Walt wouldn’t be amused.
1873 Levi Strauss
When Levi Strauss’s hard-wearing overalls proved so popular that he ran out of the brown canvas sailcloth he made them from, he switched to a sturdy twill fabric called serge, made in Nîmes, France. The ‘serge de Nîmes’, as the material was known, was soon shortened to denim. Levi’s started to assume their now familiar form in 1872, when a Nevadan tailor called Jacob David contacted Strauss and suggested inserting metal rivets at points of strain – mainly pocket corners and the base of the fly – to make the trousers sturdier. Strauss and Davies patented the idea. The final touch was applied by rival H.D. Lee, who introduced a novelty called the Whizit which we now call, rather more prosaically, the zipper.
'Innovation grinds to a halt when prototypes stop being built. If your muse fails don’t mope, make something. Prototype till you’re silly'
Tom Kelley, IDEO
1885 Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach
The Reitwagen (riding car) was the world’s first petrol-driven motorcycle. In 1867 Sylvester Howard Roper had built a steam-powered motorbike with twisting handgrip throttle control in America. But its chassis, taken from a bike nicknamed the Bonecrusher, jarred riders. Using a cut-down version of Daimler’s new engine, the Reitwagen had a top speed of 7mph. But Daimler soon lost interest in his motorbike as he raced to develop the car.
1969 British Aerospace Corporation/Aérospatiale
The supersonic icon of aviation history started life in February 1956 with two prototypes, 001 in Toulouse, France and 002 in Filton, UK. The superbly designed nose drooped when the pilot needed to see the runway. In the 1970s, the aircraft was so popular it starred in the disaster movie Airport ’79. The film flopped partly because, in some scenes, the nose moved up and down while Concorde was stationary on the runway.
1946 Louis Réard and Jacques Heim
The first official bikini was modelled in Paris by nude dancer Micheline Bernardini, after no fashion model dared wear it. Micheline wore it while holding a matchbox – which was large enough to pack the string bikini into. In a sightly tasteless tribute to the explosion of excitement it was expected to create, Réard and Heim named their creation after the South Pacific Bikini atoll, where nuclear testing had begun a few days earlier.
1983 James Dyson
Inventing an object of such beautiful simplicity as the Dyson vacuum cleaner was a surprisingly complex business. It took Dyson 15 years, 5,127 prototypes and two years of meetings with potential distributors before his bagless machine finally made it to market. It was first adopted by the Japanese, who sold the first model, the G-Force, in 1986. By 2005 US sales of Dyson vacuum cleaners were worth more than those of any other manufacturer in the market.
1963 Crick and Watson
Science is supposed to be about calculations, formulations and theorising. But geneticists James Watson and Francis Crick, to the astonishment of their peers, decided that if, as Watson said, “non-trivial ideas” were to emerge, doodling, drawing and modelling might hold the key. And they did. Although one failed model prompted their boss to tell them to give up, they persevered, and were the first to identify the ‘double helix’ structure of DNA.
1968 Dick Fosbury
Before Dick Fosbury, almost everyone did the high jump by taking off from the inside foot and swinging the outside foot up and over the bar. But Fosbury ran up to the bar, took off with his outside foot and then twisted his body so he went over the bar head first. At college, he was urged to revert to the old style. One coach even told him to give up and become a triple jumper. Fosbury ignored them, won gold at the 1968 Olympics and changed the sport forever. By 1980 13 of the 16 Olympic finalists used the flop.
1776 Thomas Jefferson
“We hold these truths to be self-evident”. These are among the most famous eight words in the English language. But even Thomas Jefferson needed some advice – and a rewrite – to achieve such eloquence. Jefferson had originally written “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable”. But Benjamin Franklin told him to change it to “self-evident”, which had no religious subtext and just sounded better.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007