design
& prototyping
lecturer
Challenge:
Every semester I find ways to teach techniques and lead workshops for MBA candidates within the San Francisco State University MBA Program on Design Thinking and Prototyping that focuses on CAD-based designs for rapid prototyping, wireframing for web and app development, and paper prototyping for product design.
Process:
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Beginning with the understanding of why Design Thinking and User-Centered Design is important for future MBAs, I explain to each class that the decision of the direction of many products in development come, not from the designers, but rather from the business managers. Creative user-centered design can not only enhance the value of a product, but it can also create greater business opportunities and further growth prospectives.
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My class in particular focuses mainly on the various types of prototyping because one of the key phases in Design Thinking is to iterate and re-iterate as much as possible and as quickly as possible in order to flush out design ideas and concepts. The class is broken up into three different types of prototyping:
Wireframing:
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This portion of the class covers an overall look at the workflow of designing a website or app from sketching and paper prototyping to using a few common platforms used such as the Adobe Suite, Sketch, and InVision.
CAD-based Design for Rapid Prototyping:
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The class then gets into a more hands-on workshop as I lead them through two different platforms for CAD-design for 3D printing their prototypes, Sketch-Up and Tinkercad. While Sketch-Up is a more powerful tool, it can have a steep learning curve for beginners in CAD and therefore I only do a demo of how the tool is used. But with Tinkercad the students are able to follow along step-by-step as create a 3D model of the paper prototype that we will be building in the next section of the class.
Paper Prototyping:
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In this workshop we use foamcore, X-Acto knives, and glue guns to demonstrate how to use the materials in order to build simple and easy structures that can be used to create most Feels-Like prototypes. Below is a video of refresher tutorial of the techniques used with foamcore that the students can reference after the workshop.