Creativity

Prototyping Ideas

Jon Kolko

Jan 29, 2024

8 minute read

Making things takes time and energy. It takes blocks of reserved, uninterrupted, and focused thought and effort. Before making things can help to clear up ambiguity, it must exist in the presence of ambiguity. So a creative company empowers making at a strategic and conceptual level. Of course that company must also cover the tactical level, by giving employees the room and tools to make things.

The thing we make to represent and explore something new is known as a prototype. Rather than just words or a specification that describes an idea, a prototype shows the idea and often lets someone experience it. Prototypes take on an increasingly important role in describing the largely invisible and hard-to-describe ideas of a digital future. For example, while a self-driving car looks at least slightly different than a regular one, the innovation shift is almost entirely in software. A prototype of the idea gives form that people can experience, and that experience gives the idea credibility.

With a prototype, you can ground criticism in that reality of experience; the experience, then, connects the idea directly to value. Think a bit about what it means to critique an experience, rather than an idea. Experience is about feeling over time, colored by the connection between emotions in the present and by memories of experiences. Audiences bring their history to an experience, so that experience is personal. The evaluation of an experience can be rich, informed by a visceral emotional sense, and not just an analytical evaluation.

A creative culture embraces prototypes as a means of exploration. It expects employees to make prototypes, and it communicates that expectation through example: Leaders develop concepts, prototypes, sketches, and artifacts that represent complex ideas. Demos of interactive simulations take on more value than presentations and documents; the prototype of an idea carries more weight than the idea itself. The company also conveys its prototype expectation through compensation structures that reward makers.

“Demo or die” is the motto of the MIT media lab, considered one of the world’s most creative idea labs. Co-Founder Nicholas Negroponte, known for his One Laptop Per Child initiative, describes how demonstrations act as proof of an idea and its value: “Forget technical papers and, to a lesser extent, theories. Let’s prove by doing. Many folks in traditional computer science still think that ‘demo or die’ is all about icing and cake. Wow, are they wrong.”

To demonstrate a product, a service, or an organizational model means taking pride in the artifact’s creation. It also means recognizing that an artifact and the idea it represents are never truly complete. A company that embraces early prototypes also embraces a culture of incompleteness that nurtures a fledgling idea instead of destroying it. Imagine the confidence it takes to demonstrate an incomplete idea. Demonstration means trusting the audience to understand and evaluate a prototype. We trust the audience to see through the broken parts and incompleteness to judge the idea on the experience itself.

Tom Chi, a Co-Founder of Google X, describes that he “prototyped a fully working heads-up display on Day 1 of the Google Glass project, constructed from a coat hanger, a piece of Plexiglas that happened to be lying around, a sheet protector bought from the local convenience store, a little wire harness, and a netbook.” The audience was able to see beyond the raw materials to the idea itself. A prototype overcomes a “guessathon,” he says—thinking something will work, rather than learning it will. “[People say] ‘Oh, I think in three weeks we can do that.’ ‘I think this will work.’ ‘I think users will prefer this over that.’ These are things you probably hear a thousand times every day, at work. …Just make the thing, just make it work, and start to learn things.”

The cultural shift from talking and guessing to showing, experiencing, and proving can start in a top-down manner. Leadership can start asking and requiring demonstrations, not just presentations. If you cancel or reschedule meetings without demos, the expectation will start to become clear. This shift from a talking culture to a prototyping culture can also come bottom-up. Individual contributors can start to make actual representations of ideas, rather than meta-artifacts that discuss the ideas.

The shift from talking to making forces iterations. It becomes the way ideas roll forward, gaining momentum and clarity. A culture that embraces speed of exploration and proof, like Chi’s Google Glass prototype, is one that also embraces iterative, constant improvement. Let’s take a look at how an entire market segment emerged through this form of iterative prototyping.

The case of BodyMedia, an innovator in the personal, wearable health-tracking market, is one of constant improvement through prototyping. The vision for the wearable tracking products emerged through an iterative process that spanned over a decade of experiences. In the moment, each experience seemed unrelated to another, but in retrospect, these experiences point to the power of iteration over the long haul.

Ivo Stivoric, who, like Chi, works at Google X on the senior leadership team, was the co-founder of BodyMedia and the VP of Research and Development at Jawbone, which acquired BodyMedia. He first began exploring the wearable space as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the late 1990s. At CMU’s Engineering Design Research Center, Stivoric and his team focused on reducing the time needed to maintain US military vehicles. The researchers identified that workers needed both hands free to do their job in cumbersome physical positions.

The team solved the problem with a hip-mounted circular dial for navigating content on a heads-up display. The research also produced a seed of creative inspiration. Almost as an afterthought, the team wrote, “We were also interested in generality and in furthering our agenda of wearable computers. Thus, we not only focused on the inspection process but also put some thought into the other types of applications for which the device we were constructing could be used.”

A year later, the researchers published a seminal paper that identified generalized lessons learned from their military experiences. This paper described 13 guidelines for wearability, including body placement, weight, sensory interaction, and aesthetics. The team concluded that the study “represents a start at putting this information together, organized, in one place, to be useful as a set of guidelines and a resource for designers that need to integrate issues of wearability into a design.”

Recall the idea of “obvious in hindsight.” As the story of BodyMedia evolves, you’ll see key milestones that, in retrospect, look like obvious stepping stones towards success. This paper is one of them.

The team spun this wearable work into an incubator called Sandbox Advanced Development. There the team explored non-military uses for the research. Astro Teller, Stivoric’s partner in grad school and now the CEO of Google X, explains, “There’s an amazing opportunity to design a computer that people can carry around on their bodies [and] that knows what they want to do and can help them do it.”

The vision for a health monitoring system emerged. Stivoric explains that the team essentially camped out in a war room and explored a more global story of humanizing computing. “We had a larger vision: How is computing going to change if we never know anything about the individual? If you stopped a person on the street and said, ‘Hey, I do wearable computers,’ they were scratching their head.” In the late 90s, there was no obvious “humanized” application of wearables. The team looked at its wearable research and started canvasing what Stivoric calls “whitespace.”

Often, research and development efforts start with a given technology and look for ways to transfer and leverage it into consumer products. This method is, “technology looking for a problem.” But instead of a technology vision, Stivoric’s team rallied around a guiding user-centered vision. The focus was on making wearable computing more familiar, rather than finding a way to apply a technological advancement—the wearable design developed for the military.

In the search for contexts for wearability, the team spent time with triathletes, cardiologists, and people dealing with weight management. At the same time, the team canvassed emergent technology in early cellphones and sensors. Slowly, a story emerged around a wearable health monitor and a business to support tracking health and wellness. In 2000, the team again reorganized, this time as BodyMedia..

Stivoric explains, “we didn’t know where the business was really going to go in terms of where we were going to find our first opportunities.” The vision emerged through years of research and through “vectors” of exploration coming together. BodyMedia was the synthesis of a vector on wearable computing, a vector on health care, a vector on the shrinking costs of mobile technology, and a large guiding principle of humanizing technology. That synthesis “became a believable story for people—that the world has to move this way.”

Over the next ten years, that guiding principle helped focus the product efforts. The vision didn’t focus the company’s efforts on just a single product innovation—it acted as a motivator for the team as a viable business slowly emerged. “If you look at our business plan in the early days, we thought we were going to have a full product line of 20 SKUs and we would be in retail stores within five years. The market just wasn’t ready for it…”

The company tried different contexts, generating data from a variety of tests and showing them to potential partners like Jenny Craig and Kaiser. The process was tedious. “We talked to doctors, and they would say, ‘Well, I get paid $10,000 a surgery, so why are you going to give me a vest or some wearable? I want to cut somebody open and stick this thing in here, and I get a $10,000 check; that’s the best thing for me and the patient.”

The company met similar resistance in the professional-athlete category and the health-care-insurance market, Stivoric says, “Every time we spin up the project team [to explore another topic], we have somebody holding the torch in what both the strategy and vision are along the way.” Each iteration narrowed and focused the creative output, but the vision never fundamentally changed.

One of the prime ways to remind people of that vision is with real data. Stivoric recommends that innovators do the following: “Show what data we’re getting from people. Show them why there’s a reason to believe.” Those data have to come from real trials and from pursuit of simultaneous bets. For him, a key to the success of a creative project is identifying the “kill criteria” up front. These are the quantifiable reasons to end a project. Key project requirements come with “an asterisk that says, ‘if you can’t manage this requirement, we’re going to kill the project.’ We try to do that in advance.”

After burning through three rounds of capital over four years, BodyMedia’s primary offering started to solidify. By 2005, the company had sold more than 7500 armbands in a market that included offerings from Timex, Nike, and Polar. That market began to show convergence of data tracking—tracking exercise, nutritional intake, and the “millions of data points” that Teller describes are “spewed” off your body per second. By the time the company was acquired, it had more than 700,000 users—many on a subscription basis—and was selling devices at a $200 price point.

From Stivoric’s experience with BodyMedia, we can see several primary fundamentals emerge:

First, the product that seems obvious in retrospect came through years of prototypes. The iterations often seemed only tangentially related to one another; research into military maintenance led to research on wearables, which led to research in health care, and so on. It’s only now with the benefit of hindsight that we can string continuity between these iterations.

Next, a shared high-level vision of humanizing technology, which operates outside of a particular application of technology, led the team. Before the success of BodyMedia, the team’s innovation was in the relationship between technology and people—not in any given algorithm or software IP.

As the team iterated and explored “whitespace” opportunities, it had both implicit and explicit “kill criteria” to help identify and short-circuit ineffective exploration. This shows that leadership needs the confidence to kill a product without simultaneously killing the team’s momentum; leadership needs to maintain fidelity around the company’s vision, independent of any one product’s manifestation of that vision.

Finally, real data provided motivation, proved momentum, and grounded the high-level vision in reality. They also enriched prototypes’ fidelity, which meant that the team could actually use them.

Stivoric has brought the same philosophy to Google X, where his teams actively try to kill projects. He explains that his team “checks their ego at the door and tries to kill the project early so that we don’t spend five years and hundreds of millions of dollars” to find out that the project won’t succeed. The team pushes multiple bets at once, and emphasizes shipping products early so that they can benefit from and leverage real data in support of a larger vision.

For the BodyMedia team, prototyping occurred in a progressively narrow span of influence. The first iterations were, strategically speaking, at a “50,000 foot view”—including even what industry segment to play in. Over almost 15 years, the iterations became narrower and narrower, and when the company was acquired, in 2016, it was iterating at the product-detail level. It launched the LINK Weight Management System, the LINK Body Monitoring Armband, the bodybuggSP personal calorie management system, the GoWear fit Lifestyle, and other devices—each an iteration in its own right.

We can see from the BodyMedia story that the creative process is one of ideation combined with explicit critique (often driven by the market and usage data itself)—and that each iteration extracts constraints that act as criteria for the next round of iterations.

Stivoric’s experiences with iterations match Tom Chi’s experiences with creating rough prototypes for Google Glass. They reflect the ethos at Google X around iteration and prototyping. That ethos flourishes in a company culture that recognizes early-stage ideas as poorly formed explorations, not presentations. Such a culture demands, and rewards, constant iteration and evolution, rather than a sense of finality and completeness.