Defining the prototyping space to support the innovation process with fablabs

Among the different roles that can be assigned to fablabs, the one of a prototyping place to support InnovationLab is recurrent. In this context, the prototyping activity can take a broad scope, covering different phases of the innovation process, from problem definition and customer validation to project development. As a consequence, the role of fabmanagers extends to the one of prototyping coach. The projects supported can be products as well as services and the people may not be pure maker profiles. Therefore, it seems appropriate to develop a global vision for prototyping that encompasses these different situations, promoting the posture “How can I start making my project with the available resources?” Here, we propose to explore the potential of transposing a model from human-computer interaction (Houde & Hill, 1997) (Yang, 2005) to the field of design sciences. The model intends to separate design issues into the “role”, the “look and feel” and the “implementation” axes. In order to better understand the meaning of each axis, we propose an adaptation of the model and an evaluation method to position the prototype on the different axes. The “role” focuses on the integration of the context, the interactions and the target audiences associated to a project. The “look and feel” supports the need to represent the project from a rough sketch that supports the visualization of an idea to a well-defined project that can be properly assembled, it defines “how the project will look like”. The “implementation” axis targets the technical aspects of the project, it helps to drive the technical development of the project: “how the project works”. The model has been tested on a first series of entrepreneurial projects. For instance, in the process of developing a tool to unbend pylons, we created a prototype of pylon with adapted characteristics justified by the need to clarify the problem. On one hand, being able to position the prototype on this model helped the participant to better understand the process they were involved in. On the other hand, understanding the model characteristics helped to define the prototyping effort regardless of the technical feasibility nor the look and feel of the solution. From this, we explicitate the aforementioned axis with different case studies to clarify their benefits from other prototyping compasses