The Role of Prototype in Design Research

PARIDE.Prototipi Avanzati per la Ricerca di Design (Advanced Prototypes for the Design Research) is a one-year Research Project funded by the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano within the FARB Program.
The Project aimed at investigating the evolution of the role of the prototype in design research, given the recent two prominent and interrelated phenomena: the technological evolution that both enables and requires the making of new types of prototypes and, the evolution of design as an academic discipline that continuously widens its perspectives, fields, and research methods and – thus – the uses it makes of prototypes.

The one-year research was planned on the three main phases:

1) Understanding
The first objective of this phase was to map the definitions of “prototype” and investigate the role it traditionally plays in the design process and its emerging roles in the field of design research. This phase was based on analysis and synthesis of data coming from the literature review. To show this outcome, we developed a visual interactive Map.
The Map shows the relations among the main criteria (discipline, aims and terminology), which – in our understanding – define the prototypes.

The result of the literature review was the definition of an initial theoretical framework describing the role that prototypes plays in design research, particularly the aims and ways in which prototypes are used and the types of knowledge they support generating.

2) Learning from
The main objective of this phase was to validate the theoretical framework. We, therefore, planned a set of interviews with researchers and asked them to share a case study of one of their design research, where – in their opinion – the role of prototypes was relevant. We collected their examples of prototypes’ applications in design research. The data collection format was based on the set of criteria that we detected during the literature review.
Eventually, the case studies were compared and analysed by making an interactive visual Tool that enabled us to highlight relevant relations of the criteria defined during the research.

3) Describing
The goal was to describe an overview of the design research phenomenon and the prototypes’ related role.

In this website we let viewers use the interactive Maps and Tool that we developed during the research.