21st Century Prototyping Technologies

Design today is both physical and digital.

That’s especially true when designing new products. Designers need to bring together a myriad of digital and physical prototypes, models, and tools to develop and test their ideas, with each tool bringing its own costs, strengths and obstacles. Navigating the web that these tools create is a complex task for any designer, and costs companies time and money.

Coupled with this, the increasing technicality of modern products is pushing design out of the hands of users and making it difficult for their voice to be heard. Although there’s a growing demand for user-voice and customised, bespoke products, to engage effectively with design they must be able to rise to the complexity of products and the tools used to create them.

In this project, we’re investigating how we can use Immersive Technologies (XR) to bring the physical and digital domains together in design. We believe that these technologies hold huge potential to streamline design processes, offload complexity to computation, and simultaneously increase accessibility to anyone regardless of their background.

By redefining the prototyping toolchain to simultaneously strut both the physical and digital, this project envisions a world where the tools work for the designer, rather than create a web for them to navigate.