Understanding the prototyping strategies of experienced designers

Engineering students need to learn highly effective processes for pursuing difficult design problems that require highly innovative solutions. Few studies exist of highly successful expert design teams. The current paper presents the results from a multi-million dollar department of energy research project which reduced the racking hardware and mounting installation costs for commercial applications by more than 50%. This was an extremely challenging goal which was met. This study focuses on the prototyping processes of the team in order to determine effective approaches. Structured interviews with documentations of the prototypes were conducted. Results show the team while the team started with prototyping the complete system they often iterated at the component then integrating it into the complete system prototypes. The early tests of the prototypes tended to be less formal and the number of test increased with each prototype. The professional team also reverted to earlier versions and restarting their processes when a given design path was not successful.