I remember hearing in an early PPAT lecture that as design teams, we should aim to “fail fast”. Fail fast? Psssh. How about fail never?
Am I a perfectionist? Perhaps. Am I an introvert? Most definitely. Has PPAT been hard because I’m not an engineer? Nope. This class has been hard because it forces me to share my ideas, including the partially-formed, poorly-articulated, questionably-possible ones. Especially those, actually.
I read this article about low-fidelity prototyping, which rang especially true. The author notes that a desire for perfection in the design process can be paralyzing; the flip side, of course, is wasting resources on design failures that could have been caught earlier. In our project this semester, we’ve certainly felt this tension, and I have often found myself on the side of inaction. The biggest danger of inaction, I’ve learned, is that a project can progress in separate chunks or phases. Additions are not synonymous with iterations, just as a first paragraph does not constitute a rough draft.
So how will I resolve this tension, and learn to “fail fast”? I’d like to think of PPAT as the first iteration of myself as a design thinker. I’ve gotten better at thinking with a group through multiple solutions, and when I approach a new project, I’ll be better equipped to hit the ground running. I’ve gotten better at communicating a near-and-dear idea and watching it flop to poor reception. Most importantly, I have learned that progress is only a product of action. Start somewhere.
Awesome, thanks for sharing this. I feel that I (at least partially) learned the same lessons you have when I took PPAT. Our team definitely over-engineered our device, and in the end it wasn’t as usable as it could have been if we had used a lower-fidelity solution and carried out more iterations and testing. I still feel like I fall victim to the paralysis of inaction at times, but it’s something I hope to keep working on!