164: The 3 Prototyping Phases for New Product Development
Tim Uys has spent 25 years as a senior design, leader, and lecturer in the industrial design and mechanical design engineering world. He has worked for Nike Golf, Dell, Qualcomm, Ironman and many others while the director of design for IDOne, which was one of the top Austin design firms back in the early days before it was acquired. For the past 8 years, Tim has been the head of design for our very own Mako Design out of our Austin, Texas office. Today Tim is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand what each of the key 3 types of prototypes are, the order of those prototypes, and the importance of each of those phases of new product prototyping in order to manufacture a great and successful hardware product.
Today you will hear us talk about:
- Mock Prototype / Rough Prototype
- Costs are relatively low to iterate and for parts
- Focus on big picture items, not the details, is key in a first prototype
- You can even have a series of rough prototypes or prototype parts to test a number of different things
- Mechanical / Functional Prototype
- You can do pieces of a prototype either in tandem, or linear,
- Mechanical test prototypes use more complex parts, so it requires more advanced prototyping parts so that you can much closer mimic the final production mechanics parts.
- Even if costly, in the end, you are solving the problem.
- You cannot go to production without going into proper prototyping.
- There is a tremendous amount of value in building mechanical features that closely represent the manufactured product, so that you can perfect those mechanical design elements.
- Refined / Presentation Prototype
- A final prototype is usually used by hardware startups for selling, but also for manufacturing.
- Manufacturers need to have the product fully vetted out in order to get a reliable manufacturer to take on the project.
- Iteration in produce development is very important
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