Industrial design for new product development often includes manufacturing prototypes. A prototype is a pre-production version of the product that may be produced during various stages of the design process in order to test different aspects of the new product. New technologies, such as computer-controlled rapid prototyping, allow prototypes to be made much more easily now than in the past, leading to new breakthroughs in market response and product development.

Reducing Risk with Prototypes

Manufacturing a prototype of a product can serve a number of different purposes. Firstly, prototyping can reduce some of the risks associated with developing a new product, including both technical risks and commercial risks. Especially when developing novel approaches to solving technical problems or when dealing with new manufacturing technology, prototyping is important in testing the success of those solutions. Prototyping can also allow test groups to evaluate the performance of new technical features of the product.

Prototyping allows product developers to reduce commercial risks by testing general consumer response. The developers are able to offer several test versions of the product to evaluation teams and gain critical feedback, allowing them to select the strongest features for final production. Production prototypes and raid prototypes are commonly used to gather consumer response data regarding the commercial potential of the aesthetics of a product.

Typically, a new product may go through many stages of prototypes, including everything from sketches to functional models. Some of the more complex types of prototypes, such as CAD models or functional models, may undergo similar production techniques as the actual product would, allowing designers to test manufacturing issues. Though the cost of prototyping generally increases with the complexity of the prototype, the risk reduction benefits of prototypes are generally held to be worth the cost.