This Is a Prototype: The Curious Craft of Exploring New Ideas

by Scott Witthoft, Stanford d.school

A practical guide to prototyping as a way to revolutionize your work and creative life, from Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka the d.school.

Prototyping is a way to test an idea to see if it can be successful before investing too much time and too many resources. But it’s not only designers who “prototype” as they work. A skateboarder tries a new trick; that’s a prototype experience. A chef experiments with a new dish and new ingredients; that’s a prototype experience, too. Once a prototype is made, the creator gains knowledge about what worked and what didn’t, what should be used again and what should be trimmed from the experience.

This is a book about becoming better at prototyping by building things and experiences that will help you learn from your attempts, no matter what you’re aiming to achieve. Readers will learn how to not only create prototypes but also how to reflect on the success and failure of those attempts. Scott Witthoft, who teaches courses in design and prototyping to students around the world, introduces a comprehensive number of tools and materials for prototyping, including digital platforms and physical objects. And he breaks down real-life examples of prototype experiments with accompanying photographs for the reader to observe large- and small-scale prototyping in action.

With Witthoft as your guide, you’ll put the principles of design into practice and bring your vision to life—one prototype at a time.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2022

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Stanford d.school is an interdisciplinary department devoted to principles of design. It came to national attention a few years ago when it offered the first hugely successful massive open online course. There are a lot of interesting ideas that boil up out of the d.school, and I am interested in ways to stimulate my own creativity and to find better ways to use principles of design to realize one or two of the crazy ideas that excite me from time to time. Rick Rubin's fine book, The Creative Act, was helpful in pushing me in that direction, though it was focused on creative ideas. My ideas tend to be more in the realm of business and technology, though there are definite parallels with creativity in the art world. The d.school is more rooted in product design, but it is intended to teach and promote design ideas that are applicable in every field that involves design, which, in a broad sense, is every part of life.

In looking through my Stanford alumni magazine, I discovered that the d.school has put out a series of short books dealing with design principles, and I treated myself to the set as a holiday present. This is my first one. I'll be working my way through the others over the next few weeks (or maybe months). As you would expect, the books are beautifully designed, with attractive and functional graphics laid out in sections that are easy to refer back to.

This one is about prototyping. The concept of prototyping discussed here is very broad and encompasses any sort of preliminary trial embodiment of an idea that is not itself the final execution, but that points the way to the final goal of the project. It's almost surprising that any useful generalization is possible with such a broad conception, but the book does a good job of teasing out general principles that can be useful in many contexts and at different stages of the prototyping process.

My one problem with this book, which was also a problem for me with Rick Rubin's book, is that in order to get real value from the great ideas presented for putting my creativity to work, I'd need to have an active project where I could apply them. Otherwise, most of the wisdom will fade from my mind before I am able to inculcate it as natural part of my process. Sadly, I have no current active projects that are suitable for applying most of the ideas in this book, but I can look for ways to apply them in things that are sort of like prototyping (drafting agreements? experiments in cooking or gardening?). In any case when I have a project where the ideas of this book apply more directly, I will know that I have it as a reference that I can pull off the shelf.

[Brooke Dilling · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. But having a difficult time with the specifics of a physical prototype vs. prototyping something less tangible/more conceptual — like prototyping a new recipe or a new way to work.

The authors jumped back and forth between needing materials to build something physical to having the prototype be a concept that you try.

So the book left me feeling like I don’t really have a clear understanding of how to do the work in front of me.

[Varun Mittal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this torturous book felt like I was reading not a book but its prototype. Without a clear structure and a lot of fugazi, this book does not provide an insight or a perspective on anything. Most of what this book teaches can be learnt on the job in almost any job - prioritization, thinking before acting, process of deduction / elimination / derivation, etc. Additionally, the book may be a drag for not only generalists but even engineers and designers.

[Ivana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book.

Some of my favorite quotes / aha moments:

- "How do you close the gap between I wonder and I know? You make a prototype."
- “The time to start making a prototype is right now” “Make it fake, but do it for real”
- "Prototypes need to be designed"
- "The best-built prototypes are measured by what you learn from them, not by how they look"
- “The prototype must let go of their crafted work, knowing that it is disposable by definition, in service of learning what must come next.”
- When testing a prototype, make a note when you notice SURPRISE: "Hey, I was surprised when you did that. Can you tell me more about why you did that?"
- “Quantity over quality, with caveats”

[Jordan Peasant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that helped me change the way I see the world. You’d be surprised how many things in your daily life you can prototype. I will definitely be referring back to this book regularly.