I know a guy who was right there at the beginning of ultralight sailboat design. When they started creating fast, fiberglass boats instead of heavy, lagging timber hulls.
He would literally “shape” the boat hulls by hand, by sight. He was a prototyper.
He also designed the original O’Neill logo designed the original O’Neill logo.
I also remember studying six sigma and ISO quality standards in an Operations Management paper at university.
Now this stuff was far from radical*.
The thing is, there’s a place for quality and meeting standards.
In this case we were learning how to engineer aircraft, so it was probably applicable…
However, design flair, emotional impact, innovation and story all fall largely outside the boundaries of quality and spec.
Rapid idea generation, creation, prototyping, testing, re-development all happen fast.
When we are creating the new, we aren’t as concerned about matching the old.
Quality can fall by the wayside. And it must.
Of course, this “prototype thinking” won’t take us all the way, and definitely not all the time.
But when we tend to get hung up on resistance, and stuck in old ways, focusing less on quality and learning to move fast can be super helpful.
*Granted, the lecturer for this one was particularly tedious.
