Thursday, October 21, 2021
Make Some Paper and Tape Prototypes!
ExhibiTricks: The Museum Exhibit Design Blog: Earlier this month I was delighted to present an exhibit prototyping workshop at the Museums Alaska conference.
Thomas Edison said, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." His reference was to inventing, but he could have also been speaking about prototyping.
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6 comments:
Prototyping is especially important for us as students to do, we experiment with a lot of new techniques and are constantly learning the best way to achieve what we want. When you have a limited budget or availability of a certain material, using office supplies like the article suggests is a great way to save money and prevent yourself from going straight into a project and then panicking because you made a mistake, and having to start over. In the costume department we do similar prototyping, sometimes using paper but often using muslin and cheaper materials to make a first draft of a costume. Then, that muslin can be fitted and when we cut out pieces from our final expensive fabric, we are confident that the costume will fit the actor. I appreciate the author breaking down every step of the process and I will be using these tips in future projects.
I really like this idea of making rough prototypes, something I struggle with is two-fold. First, prototyping could help in the ideation phase. I am not good at seeing things or arranging things in my head when I am generating ideas for art, I need to be able to see in front of me, or ideally work with my hands to see it in front of me for that second point, figuring out physical and concrete details of how things are going to work. I am notorious for getting concepts I like and getting excited about them but not developing them sufficiently and then them changing rapidly and greatly when I realize I can’t do what I want to do, resulting in a lowering of quality when I don’t have the time to do it properly. I also want to try a bit further of engaging with the people around me as I am working to get thoughts and reactions as a testing pool, I’m usually very private about art and want to break out of the habit.
Prototyping is a concept that I, quite frankly, am bad at, and need to get better with. Oftentimes, I'm guilty of just going straight from an idea in my head to the final product with no steps in-between. The most I usually do is a quick sketch beforehand. I think that's a very ADHD quality of mine sadly - I find it difficult to hold creative and productive focus on something for long enough to iterate on it before my attention gets shifted elsewhere, outside of my control. Therefore, I rush to make something as soon as I have the idea and my hyperfocus takes hold. Properly learning how to prototype with inexpensive materials may help to keep my focus going, by seeing a physical manifestation of my project even though it is not the final product, and helping me to know what works or not. Plus, it's inexpensive. What's not to like?
Prototyping was always a dreaded process for me in Freshman year design courses because I just wanted to move on, and start the actual project. I think I understood the value of making a quick model, but preferred not to do it (even though it ended up taking even more time later on). I do remember in a scenic design course I took in high school, my teacher required us to complete a white model, and even suggested we make it flexible. He said that if a director and design team were brainstorming with this model, you want to be able to shift the angle of a wall, or move the furniture, or even take something out entirely. This doesn't allow for the prettiest or most stable model, but the concept of prototyping is not about that; it's about ideas. And using cheap painters tape and paper like this article suggests would allow it to feel more casual and less precious, which is beneficial to the entire design process.
Prototyping is certainly a necessary aspect of the design process, whether that is creating a model box for a design to a scale mechanism to test a system. Personally, I struggle with doing paper and type prototypes, since it just seems so frustrating quite frankly. I see the value, don't get me wrong, but personally I would rather start with more robust materials or even on the computer before resorting to paper and scissors. Sometimes I feel like we can spin our wheels when prototyping because we get too caught up in that phase before wanting to make the leap to a full-scale model. Sometimes I also feel like we forget that it is okay to prototype in full scale, since that is often where you find scaling problems such as the square-cube law. That comes with the expense of real materials, of course, but I think you can often be smart about using scrap or extra pieces to make up for that. In our shop, that is often the case.
I think that this article really touches on something I want to change as a designer. I rarely do prototypes, simply because i don't have the effort or motivation to do it. I feel like, I really want to learn how to prototype more and put that in my creative process. Because I understand how important it is for us to put a type things such as myself or even just other processes of design in theatre.It is always difficult for me to try and fill in the app for it for him hello typing but I feel like it is incredibly important for us to do that type of stuff because it saves time ultimately and it saves money. I hope that in my education here in university I learn how to make prototypes more efficiently and put that in my creative process better, so that I can become a better designer.
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