Prototype

Discuss one of the best prototypes you have encountered, either yours or someone else’s. Why was it great? What did you or its designer learn from it? What would the designer have missed if the prototype had never been built?

Initially when I decided to blog about this topic, I wanted to write about prototypes I had created while working as a graphic designer and their importance in avoiding future disappointments.

However, last week, I went on a tour  to The Long Now Foundation at Fort Mason and came across a fascinating prototype for their “10,000 Year Clock” project. This clock is meant to be an symbolic work for long term thinking. It is designed to tick for 10,000 years and is scaled to be as a monumental piece built inside a mountain in West Texas.

The scale and the detail of these prototypes is significant as it is made up of thousands of parts. in order for them to test and learn every step they had to divided the project into different parts and create a prototype for each part. Given the massive scale of the project, some prototypes needed to be built at a smaller scale just for the designer to test if the technical aspect of the project would works. Other prototypes were just designed to study human interaction with the project.

In addition, during the tour, I learned about the different levels of the prototype. As can be seen from the posted pictures, some prototypes are very small and made with cheap material, such as wood. For a project this scale, I don't think the designers will ever be able to build the final project without going through several prototypes.

Overall I was very impressed with the work and I am looking forward to see the final project especially so that I may compare the prototypes to the final project.