The concept of prototyping purpose : towards a new kind of taxonomic classification

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Petrakis, Konstantinos and Hird, Abigail and Wodehouse, Andrew (2019) The concept of prototyping purpose : towards a new kind of taxonomic classification. Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 1 (1). pp. 1643-1652. ISSN 2220-4342 (https://doi.org/10.1017/dsi.2019.170)

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Abstract

A prototype can be generally defined as a preliminary version of a final product and it can represent both aesthetic and functional features. Prototyping, the process of building a prototype, constitutes an indispensable part of product development processes. Many classifications of prototypes which use a different range of criteria have already been developed and are known as Prototype Taxonomies. This paper proposes an agenda towards the development of a new taxonomic classification which will be based on a prototype's attributes and its intended purpose. This work is justified from the results of an analysis of 8 existing prototype taxonomies which indicate that there is not a taxonomy that explicitly uses the prototypes’ purposes as its basic taxonomic dimension. A definition of the term ‘Prototype Purpose’ is proposed through discussing the differences and relations to the term ‘Prototype Role’. This work results in a list of 23 explicit prototype purposes which arise from 7 roles of prototyping found in relevant literature: Learning, Communication, Demonstration, Integration, Refinement, Exploration and Requirement Elicitation.

ORCID iDs

Petrakis, Konstantinos, Hird, Abigail ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5938-2726 and Wodehouse, Andrew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9605-3497;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)