Creating your Own Tools: Prototyping Environments for Prototype Testing

Abstract

Evaluating prototypes through prototype experiments is an essential part of most early stage, exploratory, product development processes. The rate at which prototypes are tested is often high and even incremental improvements in test outcomes, such as learnings and iteration speed, can be of great influence for the outcome of projects. Based on observations from a highly exploratory product development project and use existing classifications from literature to study how test environments can be prototyped in parallel with the main prototyping activities, and how fundamental trade-offs in test environment characteristics can be flexibly changed to fit each test in doing so. By getting a better understanding of how test environments can be used as tools, a higher momentum might be achieved in iterative prototyping.