February 13, 2005
Cross-Media Prototyping Comparison
In my weekly meeting with Terry Winograd we hit upon an interesting question: What are the characteristic differences in prototyping practice in different media? What aspects are fundamentally the same or fundamentally different about protoyping mechanical devices and software? Some of the first realizations: In product design you build a prototype, then start from scratch for the next iteration. In code, existing files are changed and parts rewritten, but rarely do you simply discard the entire source tree. Are there analogies to writing software with and without versioning? Now how about sketches for paintings, musical composition, or architectural prototypes? A systematic investigation would be a nice side project.
Mike Kuniavsky, in his previously referenced post scored sketching/protoyping systems according to speed, provisionality, and history. What other schemes can we come up with?
Posted by Bjoern Hartmann at February 13, 2005 2:04 AM