Prototyping Q&A with Gray Garmon
This extended question-and-answer content comes from an on-going experiment I started while writing a recent book about prototyping. That experiment involved asking the same specific questions about prototyping of people I know or know of, admire, wondered about, and otherwise respect. Both then and now I’m trying understand what prototypes and prototyping mean to design professionals and a wider orbit of people beyond the practice.
A few notes about Gray:
Gray Garmon is a designer, trained formally as an architect. He is an award-winning professor at the School of Design and Creative Technologies at UT Austin, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Integrated Design. His work and interests literally encompass the globe through philanthropic design work with the Aga Khan Foundation, volunteer work with the Peace Corps, and myriad civic design projects in the United States and Texas more specifically. He is also an accomplished product and service designer in consultation with startups and long-established corporations. I am grateful to him for sharing his wealth of perspectives.
“Prototype” has a literal definition and has lots of implications — what do you think it communicates well? Where is it a total miss?
Gray Garmon: I think that the standard definition of “prototype” is great about communicating a sense of incompleteness, and a rough ‘first-try’ of an idea. I teach students from every college at the University of Texas and many of them have heard of prototyping. They have a vague sense about “trying out” an idea and making something. For engineers that might be a physical “working” piece of tech, and for liberal arts students that might mean a first draft of a written set of thoughts. So I love that some part of the ethos of prototyping is permeating many disciplines.
What the standard definition totally misses is that prototypes are not the goal. An idea or a concept does not stop with a prototype. What I love about prototyping is that it often illuminates all the gaps in an idea and all the assumptions that are wrong, but oftentimes I think this same outcome means that folx don’t go past the prototype. They make a prototype, potentially recognize all the difficult work ahead to fix and iterate, and they lose some of the initial nascent need of the idea. It’s like my great grandmother used to say, “When the prototyping gets tough, the tough…get ready to switch ideas to something easier.” *
How does prototyping show up differently in your personal versus professional life? (… or your recreational life or experimental life?)
GG: First off, I now plan to start an experimental life.
I think that my attitude towards prototyping is well aligned with both my personal and professional life. For me, the greatest part of prototyping is the mindset and the attitude. There are many things I don’t know how to do, how to build, or what the outcome will be. With the mindset of prototyping, it means that I can approach the outcomes with curiosity (and a dash of empathy for myself). I start with, “This might or might not work!” but either way, I know I’m not done. I’m just gaining new insight about what to do next.
For example, in my personal life, I’ve been testing a new prototype of posting meals (I call them “combos”) on the front of my fridge to remind me of all the things I can make from the random combination of stuff in the fridge. I love to cook dinner and usually have a recipe plan, but lunch is a mess. I’m often way past the point of “I’m hungry,” and I’m running between Zoom meetings, and I don’t really have the creativity to imagine a meal on the spot. My prototype consists of post-its on the fridge with meal ideas. This means I no longer have to fling open the fridge to see sauerkraut, bread, roasted veggies, leftover faux bacon and have no idea what to eat. My post-it tells me I can make a Veggie Reuben Sandwich and that there is also homemade salsa in the fridge drawer, and some tortilla chips in the cabinet. Boom! A quick tasty lunch using little brainpower. And it’s meant way less wasted food and leftovers at the end of the week.
In my professional life, it’s the same attitude but the prototypes are often about curriculum. My title at UT Austin might be Professor, but I approach the classroom like any other design project. My goal is to design engaging learning experiences. I consider all aspects of the experience to design creative environments by engaging emotions, designing artifacts, and leading meaningful moments of learning. By approaching each class with the attitude of prototyping, then I’m able to reflect and gather feedback to iterate my lessons to deliver an even better experience the next time. This mindset and orientation create space for landing insights and arriving at “A-ha!” reflections.
Thinking of a recent project in which intentionally you used a prototype — whether a challenge or a breeze — what were ways you knew if the prototype was going well or poorly?
GG: When I’m working on personal, non-client projects, my first prototype is often centered around the question “Is this even possible?” Granted, I’m not trying to challenge Elon Musk for his dominance of moon-shot ideas, but I am often curious to push my own understanding of what is possible. “Can we sew mylar emergency blankets into an airtight balloon? Can we fill that balloon with helium? If we do fill it, will it float? If it floats, will it accidentally fly away into federal airspace and I’ll get sent to prison? And, importantly, if it works… will it create the experiential moments we’re hoping for?”
I can report that I’m not in federal prison and yes, this floating gold balloon was magical. I created this art installation for a design event called Field Day, hosted by the Better Block Foundation. I worked with my good friend, and genius-level fabricator, Rickey Crum. We spent a few days trying different methods of melting mylar and taping until we found something that worked. And we filled it with $100 in helium because that was all they would sell us at the party store down the street.
Yet the big idea was not about just making a giant gold balloon, but how we might use simple materials, and a dynamic piece of art to help define a space for an event in a massive open field. The balloon floated and shifted above the field all day, and at night we shined lights on it which created magical reflections all over the ground.
It wasn’t a breeze, but boy was it fun. It’s back to the attitude of making a prototype to learn something. We failed so many times with many initial attempts to create airtight seams, but that was just all part of the joy of working with a good friend and trying something we had never done before. We only made one, but I learned so much about how to create experiences, how to work with new materials, how to research “federal air space” and more. This continues to be invaluable to my work as a designer and educator.
What’s a go-to prototyping tool you use most regularly? (Please feel easy interpreting “tool” loosely — object, state of mind, constraint, whatever…)
GG: My favorite prototyping tool is a question. That might be a bit esoteric, but it’s truly the most helpful aspect of guiding my work. It provides the starting point for what I’m hoping to achieve. This can range from, “Is this even possible to make?” to “What is the most welcoming sound for the first time someone turns on a device?” The questions tend to evolve as a project progresses, too. Initial questions are often about giving direction for if or how to move forward and latter are primarily about how to refine a concept.
My other favorite tool is blue painter’s tape! I use blue tape for everything from blocking out a new space, to making impromptu band-aids. I love blue tape, particularly for its color. The color is bold, implying that it’s not the “official” or high craft version of a mock-up or prototype. The bright blue is also high-contrast, making spatial mockups easy to see. It’s also sticky, but not too sticky. Sticky enough to hold something together, but won’t leave behind a glue residue once you pull it off. That might seem like a small thing, but that is so important to me.
Between the Post-Its and blue tape, 3M has really figured out the perfect “stickiness” for designers. Kudos to the 3M Glue Team.
What’s missing from the discussion of prototyping?
GG: I think something missing from prototyping is a discussion about the balance of quality and purpose. In my consulting work, I’ve seen that some folx think a prototype means cardboard and blue tape, and others think a prototype is a $2 million web application. The reality is that both can be true, but what is missing is an understanding that the quality of the prototype should match what the team is hoping to learn at that stage.
If the question is, “Is this too big for the room?” then the prototype should be as cheap and fast as possible (blue tape is great for this), and as the team starts to ask more complex questions they should also make high fidelity prototypes.
I’ve included a 2x2 that I use to help Design teams consider what fidelity of prototype they might want to make next.
What’s a change in how you think of prototyping *now* contrasted to how you may have thought/acted in the past?
GG: My greatest “now” understanding is that prototypes should be experiential.
I started my career in Architecture, and a prototype (although we rarely used those terms) is about function, form, or space. Those are important questions worth learning about for buildings, but in many ways it missed (or avoided) the most obvious questions about buildings: “How does it feel to be in this space?”
But that is not the whole profession. A good example of prototyping in architecture came from my time working for architects Herzog and de Mueron in Switzerland. We would invest weeks building full-scale mockups of our designs. Sometimes it was a fifteen foot column made of foam-core to see how it felt to stand next to something so large and sculptural, and other times it was cast concrete to see if the patterns looked beautiful in the daily cycle of sunlight. Most of these prototypes were about experiences, but most architects are just making renderings to communicate an idea.
My point of view has continued to shift, and I hope that it only grows and expands along the course of my life and career. Now I have prototyped policy changes for affordable housing, pop-up parklets, new technologies for storytelling, public plazas, curriculum, entire school schedules, and even better ways to eat fridge leftovers during a pandemic.
* TBD if my great grandmother ever said this. It’s unlikely. But this is a good prototype of jokes about my great grandmother’s opinions about Design.
Learn more about Gray’s work at UT Austin School of Design and Creative Technologies.
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Buy the book, This Is a Prototype, here.
