Definition of Prototyping

The healthcare sector experiences external pressure from a rapidly evolving world, forcing it to adapt to the new challenges and opportunities this brings with it. In our definition of health innovation, we situated it in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, forcing us to re-think relationships between human and technological advancements. Critical to this re-conceptualization, we asserted that health innovation needs to be explicitly aware of its environment, its user, and its practitioner in its aims to deliver quality and equitable healthcare. We can already see this in how the 4th Industrial Revolution has re-configured our lived reality by blurring previous divisions across several disciplines and industrial sectors, bringing about ubiquity and unionization in many aspects of our lives. This is played out explicitly and implicitly as a convergence of methodologies, ideas and solutions to address particular challenges.

Prototyping sits squarely in this space as a tool that firstly bridges the distance between patients' challenges and needs and healthcare solutions, and secondly, converges various ideas, models, and methods from several disciplines and sectors to develop, evaluate and improve solutions.

Prototyping is a critical tool in a design process used to make abstract ideas more tangible and determine their feasibility to address a previously defined challenge (such as a product, service, process, framework etc.) (Liedtka & Ogilvie, 2010). It is an iterative and experimental tool to facilitate the exploration of solving an identified problem (Petrakis, Wodehouse, & Hird, 2021). Through feedback from the end-user, it enables continuous refinement and evaluation of a potential solution (Petrakis, Wodehouse, & Hird, 2021). Tim Brown (2008) also sees prototyping as “building to think” tools as they can also be used to pinpoint problems, stimulate imagination, and facilitate idea exploration (ideation) (Petrakis, Wodehouse, & Hird, 2021). The focus of prototyping is the insight gained through the actual prototyping process rather than the final prototyping product.

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References

Liedtka, J., & Ogilvie, T. (2010). Ten tools for design thinking.

Petrakis, K., Wodehouse, A., & Hird, A. (2021). Prototyping-Driven Entrepreneurship: Towards a Prototyping Support Tool Based on Design Thinking Principles. The Design Journal, 24(5), 761-781. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2021.1957531