The Makerspace is a great place to test out ideas and quickly iterate through designs. One can do this efficiently by leveraging prototyping and pretotyping techniques to answer questions about your ideas. 

What is the difference between Prototyping and Pretotyping?

Pretotyping:

The first place to go when developing your idea. This is design framework developed by Alberto Savoia centered around the idea of

"building the right it before building it right."

When Pretotyping, you are focused on creating low resolution things quickly for the lowest possible cost and time requirement. 

Prototyping is the next step, looking to answer specific questions about the design, with more thought in between iterations.

Questions Prototyping can Answer:

  • Can it be built?
  • Will it function in any way? As desired?
  • How many design parameters can be changed?
  • How will it fail? 
  • How will people interact with it? 

What does Pretotyping look like in the Makerspace?

  • Using minimal resources to quickly iterate through designs
  • Use Legos, offcuts from other processes, or othermanufactured materials to stand in for mechanical components and linkages
  • Focus on completing designs, not perfect designsiterative design process using cardboard