by Tim Brown
Traditionally, one of the problems with architectural design is that full-scale prototyping is virtually impossible because it is just too expensive. Instead, an imaginative team of “space designers” rented an old warehouse in a dicey part of San Francisco’s Bayview district, where they built a full-scale mock-up of the entrance lobby and a typical guest suite of foam core. Their mock-up was not intended to showcase the aesthetic qualities of the space. Rather, it served as a stage on which designers, the client team, a group of hotel owner-operators, and even “customers” could act out different service experiences and explore in real space and real time what felt right. All the visitors were encouraged to add Post-its to the prototype and to suggest changes. This process yielded a host of innovations that included personalized guidebooks with local information tailored to repeat clients and their specific needs as well as a huge wall map in the lobby where guests could use magnetic tiles to mark interesting restaurants or other landmarks—a sort of “open-source guestbook.” This full-scale space for acting out whatever occurred to them gave the design team a rich set of ideas for further testing. Moreover, they had a much better sense of how good the ideas were. No amount of survey work or virtual simulation would have achieved the same result,
Learning to feel comfortable acting out potential ideas is obviously important for anyone contemplating an experiential approach to prototyping—Mattel’s Ivy Ross went so far as to teach new recruits to the Platypus program how to use improvisational acting techniques in the first couple of weeks of the session. Knowing some of the basics, such as how to build on the ideas of one’s fellow actors and being willing to defer judgment of them, increases the likelihood that collaborative, real-time prototyping will be successful. The amateur theatrics of an experiential prototype can look foolish. It takes a certain confidence for individuals to loosen their ties, slip off their heels, and explore an idea through improvisation.
prototyping in the wild
Most prototyping takes place behind closed doors, for obvious reasons. It is often necessary to protect the confidentiality of ideas and limit their exposure so that the competition (and sometimes management) doesn’t know what’s up. Traditional companies may arrange focus groups or customer clinics, and edgier companies such as Electronic Arts regularly bring in gamers to test their games during development. Controlled environments such as these work well enough in evaluating a product’s functional characteristics: Does it work? Will it break when dropped? How well do the parts fit together? Will an average person be able to find the on/off switch? In fact, these are often aspects of a product that can be tested by the project team members themselves. Things become more complicated with services, however, and particularly with services that rely on complex social interactions. Mobile telephony, for example, draws on intangible interactions of users with one another and with the system itself. Today’s complex ideas require prototypes to be released into the wild to see how they survive and adapt.
When the German mobile phone company T-Mobile began exploring ways of creating social groups via mobile phones, the company believed that networks of like-minded individuals could use phones not just to stay in touch but to share pictures and messages, make plans, synchronize schedules, and facilitate a hundred other interactions in a much more immediate way than with a PC. It would have been possible to create scenarios and storyboards to describe T-Mobile’s ideas, and even to create simulations to run on phones. But the social dimension of the problem would have been overlooked. The only way to achieve this was to launch a prototype service. The design team loaded two prototypes onto some Nokia phones and handed them out to small groups of users in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In less than two weeks it was clear which of the two prototypes was more compelling and why. The winning idea—helping users build social networks around events in their calendars—surprised the team, which had favored the alternative idea—helping people to create shared phone books. By launching prototypes, the team not only gathered real evidence of how the new service might be used but avoided chasing after its own less promising idea. There was only one flaw in the innovative methodology: at the end of the trial, several of the users refused to give back their phones.
Another emerging form of “prototyping in the wild” involves the use of virtual worlds such as Second Life or social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. Companies can learn from consumers about proposed brands or services before they invest in the real thing. One successful example is the Starwood hotel chain, which launched a 3-D, computer-generated prototype of its planned Aloft brand inside the virtual world of Second Life in October 2006. Over the next nine months virtual guests inundated Starwood with suggestions on everything from the overall layout down to putting radios in the showers and repainting the lobby in earth tones. When enough feedback had been collected, Starwood shut down the virtual hotel to “renovate.” When it reopened, a gala cyberparty erupted in which hip avatars danced in the lobby, flirted in the bar, and hung out around the pool. And what do you do with an expensive virtual prototype once real construction begins? Starwood donated its abandoned “sim” to the online youth empowerment group TakingITGlobal.
Starwood’s Aloft brand wanted to capture a youthful, urban, stylish, and tech-savvy clientele—just the types likely to be found cruising the neighborhoods of Second Life. But the advantages of virtual prototyping make it likely that other, more conservative businesses will begin to experiment with it. Virtual prototyping allows companies to reach prospective customers quickly and get feedback from people in numerous locations. Iterations are easy, and as more of them begin to explore the prototyping potential of online social networking, we will become increasingly adept at evaluating them. Like any prototyping medium, however, there are limitations. Virtual worlds such as Second Life rely upon avatars that represent customers, but we have no idea who they really are. This can be risky, as things are not always as they appear.
minding your own business
It is one thing to talk about prototyping material objects and even intangible services, but there is also a role for prototyping more abstract challenges, such as the design of new business strategies, new business offerings, and even new business organizations. Prototypes may bring an abstract idea to life in a way that a whole organization can understand and engage with.
HBO, famous for bringing us shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City, had by 2004 come to realize that the TV landscape was changing. It had earned its dominance in cable TV by delivering premium content, but the company could see that new delivery platforms such as Internet TV, mobile telephony, and video on demand were destined to become more important. HBO wanted to understand what the impact of these changes might be.
After a lengthy process of research and consumer observation, a strategy emerged based on creating seamless content that would spread across all of the emerging new technology platforms: desktop PCs, laptops, mobile phones, and Internet protocol television (IPTV). HBO, we concluded, should be willing to loosen its identification with cable TV and become “technology agnostic,” bringing content to customers whenever they wanted it and wherever they were. Instead of making a TV program and then thinking about what to do with DVDs or mobile content, shows should be created with these other channels in mind from the outset. We understood that this ambitious agenda challenged some fundamental premises. It required HBO not only to gain a deeper understanding of how audiences relate to media but also to break down some of the entrenched silos that existed within the company itself.
To create a compelling vision of the customer experience, the project team built prototypes and installed them in a walkthrough experience on the fifteenth floor of HBO’s New York headquarters. This enabled senior executives to see firsthand how customers might interact with TV content that they could access from different devices. For technical and analytical grounding, they constructed a future road map that ran the entire length of a wall and displayed the elements of technology, busine
ss, and culture that the company would confront as the program moved forward. Touring the fifteenth-floor environment we’d created, Eric Kessler, vice president for Marketing, got it: “This isn’t about the future of HBO On Demand. It’s about the future of HBO.”
The prototype projected HBO management into the future in a compelling, realistic way, helping them visualize both the opportunities and the challenges to come. When HBO entered into discussions with Cingular (which is now AT&T Wireless) to put premium TV content onto a mobile platform, the fifteenth-floor prototype helped them to reach a common understanding.
phase shift: prototyping an organization
HBO illustrates the need to think with our hands even when working at the level of business strategy, and the same is true for the design of organizations themselves. Institutions must evolve with changing environments. Though the company “re-org” has become a cliché in business culture, it is nevertheless one of the most fateful and complex design problems any company may face, though it is rarely accompanied by any of the basic characteristics of good design thinking. Meetings are called in which there is no brainstorming; organizational charts are drawn up with little evidence of any thinking with the hands; plans are made and directives are issued without the benefit of prototyping. I don’t know if IDEO could have saved the American auto industry, but we would have started with foam core and a hot glue gun.
To be sure, prototyping new organizational structures is difficult. By their nature, they are suspended in webs of interconnectedness. No unit can be tinkered with without affecting other parts of the organization. Prototyping with peoples’ lives is also a delicate proposition because there is, rightly, less tolerance for error. But despite this complexity, some institutions have taken a designer’s approach to organizational change.
The implosion of the dot-com supernova at the end of 2000 created a black hole whose epicenter was the San Francisco Bay Area. Designerly lofts were abandoned throughout San Francisco’s “Multimedia Gulch,” leaving only Aeron chairs and colorful iMacs; the $100,000-a-month billboards along Highway 101, the main corridor through Silicon Valley, fell empty; would-be entrepreneurs returned to college to finish their degrees. IDEO, which had been working with new start-ups while helping more established companies navigate the passage into the Internet age, was hit hard. For the first time in our history, we experienced a forced belt-tightening. I had been summoned back from the United Kingdom, where I was heading up IDEO’s European operations to take over the reins of leadership from David Kelley, who, with his exquisite sense of timing, had decided to step down just minutes (or so it seemed) before the e-bubble burst, to focus on his academic life at Stanford. It fell to me to oversee the transition to IDEO 2.0.
From a company that had once boasted that it would never grow beyond forty employees (so that we could lock the front door, jump onto a school bus, and drive to the beach), we had now expanded nearly tenfold, and although we worked hard to preserve a flat organizational structure, that growth translated into 350 careers, benefits packages, and dreams to fulfill. The stakes were high and there was no safety net, so I decided to do what designers do: I put together a team, and we launched a project. The brief? To reinvent the firm.
Having spent the previous two decades creating a human-centered design process for our clients, it would have been odd indeed if we had not applied it to ourselves. That is precisely what we did. During “Phase One” the project team fanned out across the landscape, talking to designers in each of our offices, our clients, our network of collaborators, and even our competitors to gain insight into how the field was evolving, where we were weak, and where we were strong. These discussions led to a series of workshops and our first prototypes, which took the form of a cluster of “Big Ideas” that captured the future as we saw it. One of these was the idea of “design with a small d”—using design as a tool to improve the quality of life at every level, as opposed to creating the signature objets that grace the pedestals of art museums and the covers of lifestyle magazines. Another was the idea we called “One IDEO,” the notion that our future depended on our acting not as independent studios but as a single interconnected network. A third idea was to abandon our original “studio” model—which reflected the way designers are organized—and replace it with a new, untested structure of “global practices” intended to reflect the way the world itself is organized: the “Health Practice” would focus on projects from precision medical equipment for Medtronic to educational packaging for GlaxoSmithKline; “Zero20” on the needs of kids from early infancy through late adolescence; other practices would be focused around interactive software, consumer experiences, the design of “smart spaces,” and even organizational transformation. At this point we felt that we were ready to take our prototypes out into the field. Or, to be more precise, we took the field to the prototypes.
We decided to stage a global event that, for the first time since we had expanded beyond our base in Silicon Valley, would bring together every employee of IDEO in one place: senior mechanical engineers from Boston, newly hired graphic designers from London, model makers from San Francisco, human factors specialists from Tokyo, and even our beloved receptionist Vicky in Palo Alto converged upon the Bay Area to jump-start what we soon began to call IDEO 2.0. Standing up in front of that audience of 350 peers, colleagues, and mentors to launch the event remains the high point of my career. Little did I know that the kickoff was the easy bit.
The launch—three days of lectures, seminars, workshops, dancing, and a mass version of the old computer game Pong with 350 simultaneous players—was a huge success. The following year, however, was one of the toughest I have ever experienced. As the prototypes unfolded, we learned that a story needs to be repeated many times before people understand how it applies to them and many more times again before they change their behavior. We learned that leadership teams that had been successful with small local groups might not easily project their ideas across seven locations. We learned that visionary designers who had been accustomed to complete creative autonomy did not happily adapt to the idea of market-driven practices.
We redesigned IDEO because we wanted the organization to remain flexible, nimble, relevant, and responsive to the new global environment that was taking shape. Five years on, two of the original seven practices no longer exist, a new one has been added, and one has refashioned and renamed itself twice to find better resonance with its intended clients. When it comes to organizations, constant change is inevitable and everything is a prototype. At the most challenging times we reminded ourselves that a successful prototype is not one that works flawlessly; it is one that teaches us something—about our objectives, our process, and ourselves.
There are many approaches to prototyping, but they share a single, paradoxical feature: They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.
I wrote earlier that all design thinkers, whether or not they happen to have been trained in any of the recognized design disciplines, inhabit three “spaces of innovation.” Since design thinkers will continue to “think with their hands” throughout the life of a project—aiming toward greater fidelity as it advances toward completion—prototyping is one of the practices that enable them to occupy all three realms simultaneously.
Prototyping is always inspirational—not in the sense of a perfected artwork but just the opposite: because it inspires new ideas. Prototyping should start early in the life of a project, and we expect them to be numerous, quickly executed, and pretty ugly. Each one is intended to develop an idea “just enough” to allow the team to learn something and move on. At this relatively low level of resolution, it’s almost always best for the team members to make their own prototypes and not outsource them to others. Designers may require a fully equipped model shop, but design thinkers can “build” prototypes in the cafeteria, a boardroom, or a hotel suite
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One way to motivate early-stage prototyping is to set a goal: to have a prototype ready by the end of the first week or even the first day. Once tangible expressions begin to emerge, it becomes easy to try them out and elicit feedback internally from management and externally from potential customers. Indeed, one of the measures of an innovative organization is its average time to first prototype. In some organizations, this work can take months or even years—the automobile industry is a telling example. In the most creative organizations, it can happen within a few days.
In the ideation space we build prototypes to develop our ideas to ensure that they incorporate the functional and emotional elements necessary to meet the demands of the market. As the project moves forward, the number of prototypes will go down while the resolution of each one goes up, but the purpose remains the same: to help refine an idea and improve it. If the precision required at this stage exceeds the capabilities of the team, it may be necessary to turn to outside experts—model makers, videographers, writers, or actors, as the case may be—for help.
In the third space of innovation we are concerned with implementation: communicating an idea with sufficient clarity to gain acceptance across the organization, proving it, and showing that it will work in its intended market. Here too, the habit of prototyping plays an essential role. At different stages the prototype may serve to validate a subassembly of a subassembly: the graphics on a screen, the armrest of a chair, or a detail in the interaction between a blood donor and a Red Cross volunteer. As the project nears completion, prototypes will likely be more complete. They will probably be expensive and complex and may be indistinguishable from the real thing. By this time you know you have a good idea; you just don’t yet know how good it is.
McDonald’s is a company famous for applying the prototyping process throughout each of the spaces of innovation. In the inspirational space, designers use sketches, quick mock-ups, and scenarios to explore new services, product offerings, and customer experiences. These might be kept under wraps or shown to management or consumers to get early feedback. To nurture the ideation space, McDonald’s has built a sophisticated prototyping facility at its headquarters outside Chicago where project teams can configure every type of cooking equipment, point-of-sale technology, and restaurant layout to test new ideas. When a new idea is almost ready for implementation, it will often be tested in the form of a pilot deployed at selected restaurants.