Lesson 3

Prototyping and Iteration

How do I prototype, test, and iterate an environmental solution?

The ability to create and test low-stakes prototypes is essential for developing innovative environmental solutions. Rather than taking ages to plan the perfect prototype, in this lesson you’ll jump in and get started, embracing a “build to learn” mindset where you use prototyping as a way to think through what your solution could look like, while making your ideas tangible. By learning as you build and test, you can get your idea into users’ hands early, instead of waiting for the investment to fund a full-scale prototype that may or may not work.  In the words of David Kelley, founder of design firm IDEO, our aim here is to “fail faster to succeed sooner” — in prototyping, we embrace failure as an essential way to learn and develop revolutionary ideas.  Ultimately, this helps us to quickly get to solutions that are both better for their human users, and more impactful in the natural world.  

By completing this lesson, you will learn how to turn an idea into reality: 

• Get comfortable with failure by embracing a “fail faster to succeed sooner” mindset.
• Strategically choose what to prototype, and use your prototypes to answer key questions.
• Build multiple rounds of prototypes at different fidelities.
• Practice getting honest, actionable feedback on prototypes and iterate your design accordingly.

Pre-Reading

We’ll start with the basics of prototyping: what, why, how? 

• The importance of prototyping frames the need to build quick, cheap prototypes. 
• 12 Types of Prototypes to Test Your Idea shares practical examples from well-known organizations (Dropbox, Google Glass) on how to quickly and cheaply test the essence of an idea.
• It’s easy to be limited by the feeling that you need to build a fully-fledged prototype in order to test your assumptions. These resources introduce the concept of prototyping at different levels of fidelity: starting with quick, messy prototypes helps us move much faster than trying to build a ‘perfect’ prototype the first time around.
  • What Kind of Prototype Should You Create? Shares examples of different levels of fidelity. 
  • Quickly skim the landing page of Pretotyping.org for more rationale of why we start at lower fidelities and encourage failure early in the prototyping process. 
• One of our key mindsets in prototyping is embracing failure. Rethinking how failure informs human development reframes failure as an essential part of building a truly innovative solution. By embracing failure early, we maximize our chances of later success.

Once you have a prototype, what comes next? A prototype is only as good as the conversations it inspires; Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users reminds us of the value of getting our ideas into users’ hands as soon as possible for quick feedback, rather than planning a long and elaborate study.