Rapid Prototyping
topic
Rapid prototyping as divergent thinking tool is the practice of quickly creating crude physical, digital, or conceptual representations of creative ideas to enable their evaluation and refinement through encounter with reality rather than through abstract deliberation — using the prototype as a thinking tool that makes implicit assumptions explicit, reveals unforeseen problems and opportunities, and generates new creative directions through the feedback of what the built thing actually does versus what was imagined.
Role
Rapid prototyping is the divergent thinking method that most effectively overcomes the limitation of purely verbal and conceptual idea exploration — because physical and experiential prototypes reveal properties of creative ideas that abstract description cannot, forcing the contact with material reality that all creative work must ultimately survive. The design thinking principle of 'bias toward action' — making something quickly to learn from it rather than planning extensively to avoid failure — produces more diverse creative discovery than extended abstract deliberation because the encounter with reality always generates unanticipated insights that planning cannot predict and that only the built prototype can reveal.