PN-001-005 - Reality Is Part of the Design
Journal Entry
I used to be terrible at prototyping.
Instead, I would measure. Design. Measure again. Adjust the design. Check another dimension. Go back to CAD. Measure one more time.
I thought I was being thorough.
Really, I was often just delaying the moment when the design had to meet reality.
Digital design tools are incredible. I use them constantly, and they allow me to work through ideas with a level of precision that would be difficult otherwise. But there’s something CAD can’t completely account for:
The physical world.
The wall you’re building against isn’t perfectly square. The floor isn’t perfectly level. That dimension you carefully measured doesn’t account for the molding sticking out another quarter inch. Something that looked perfectly proportioned on a screen suddenly feels enormous once it’s sitting in the room.
Reality has tolerances.
I’ve learned that sometimes the fastest way to answer these questions isn’t another measurement or another hour in CAD.
It’s a cardboard box and some tape.
Make the thing.
Or at least make enough of the thing to understand it.
A crude cardboard prototype can tell me in five minutes what I might spend an hour trying to determine on a computer. I can put it against the wall. Walk around it. Reach for it. See how it relates to everything around it. I can discover problems I didn’t even know I should have been looking for.
And because it’s cardboard, I don’t care if I’m wrong.
That’s probably the most valuable part.
There’s very little emotional investment in something that took ten minutes to make. Cut it apart. Add two inches. Move something. Tape another piece onto it. Throw the whole thing away and start again.
Every mistake costs almost nothing, but each one teaches me something.
I’ve started thinking of prototypes less as unfinished versions of the final object and more as tools for asking questions.
Does this fit?
Does this feel right?
Can I reach this?
Is it too big?
What did I forget?
CAD can help me design something that should work.
A prototype lets me find out if it actually does.
Take Away
Don’t wait until the final build to introduce a design to the real world.
Measure it. Model it. Think through it. Then grab some cardboard and make it exist.
A rough physical prototype doesn’t need to look good, and it certainly doesn’t need to be accurate down to the thousandth. It only needs to teach you something you didn’t know before you made it.
Sometimes ten minutes with cardboard is worth more than another hour in CAD.
Closing Thought
Reality is the final design constraint.