Prototypes as (Design) Tools for Behavioral and Organizational Change

Abstract

This article promotes the idea that prototyping, a method regularly employed in the design and development of products and services, is a powerful means to facilitate organizational development and change. The authors present three objectives related to prototyping that facilitate behavioral change within organizations. These objectives include building to think—creating tangible expressions of ideas enables organizational thinking to develop concretely through action; learning faster by failing early (and often)—making things tangible allows small, low-impact failures to occur early, resulting in faster organizational learning; giving permission to explore new behaviors—the presence of a prototype encourages new behaviors, relieving individuals of the responsibility to consciously change what they do. The significance of these objectives is illustrated through reference to client organizational change projects. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of applying this less analytical design-based approach to helping organizations transform the ways they work.

Keywords

organizational change rapid prototyping design methods experimentation

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Banathy, B. (1996). Designing social systems in a changing world. New York: Plenum.

Bate, S. P. , & Robert, G. (2007). Towards more user-centric OD: Lessons from the field of experience-based design and a case study. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43, 41-66.

Bodker, S. , Ehn, P. , Kammersgaard, J. , Kyng, M. , & Sundblad, Y. (1987). A UTOPIAN experience: On design of powerful computer-based tools for skilled graphic workers. In G. Bjerknes , P. Ehn , & M. Kyng (Eds.), Computers and democracy—A Scandinavian challenge (pp. 251-278). Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Bruce, R. , & Wyman, S. (1998). Changing organizations: Practicing action, training, and research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Buchenau, M. , & Fulton Suri, J. (2000). Experience prototyping. In Proceedings of Design of Interactive Systems 2000 (pp. 424-433). New York: ACM Press.

Burns, C. , Cottam, H. , Vanstone, C. , & Winhall, J. (2006). Transformation design (Red Paper 02). London: Design Council.

Burns, C. , Dishman, E. , Johnson, B. , & Verplank, B. (1995, August). “Informance”: Min(d)ing future contexts for scenario-based interaction design. Paper presented at BayCHI meeting, Palo Alto, CA.

Burns, C. , Dishman, E. , Verplank, B. , & Lassiter, B. (1997, November). Actors, hair-dos and videotape: Informance design. Paper presented at Presence Forum, Royal College of Art, London.

Coughlan, P. , & Prokopoff, I. (2004). Managing change, by design. In R. Boland & F. Collopy (Eds.), Managing as designing (pp. 188-192). Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books.

10.

Ehn, P. (1992). Scandinavian design: On participation and skill. In P. Adler & T. Winograd (Eds.), Usability: Turning technologies into tools (pp. 96-132). New York: Oxford University Press.

11.

Ehn, P. , & Kyng, M. (1991). Cardboard computers: Mocking-it-up or hands-on the future. In J. Greenbaum & M. Kyng (Eds.), Design at work: Cooperative design of computer systems (pp. 169-195). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

12.

Erikson, T. (1995). Notes on design practice: Stories and prototypes as catalysts for communication. In J. Carroll (Ed.), Envisioning technology: The scenario as a framework for the system development life-cycle (pp. 37-58). New York: John Wiley.

13.

Holtzblatt, K. , & Jones, S. (1993). Contextual inquiry: A participatory technique for systems design. In D. Schuler & A. Namioka (Eds.), Participatory design: Principles and practices (pp. 177-210). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

14.

Houde, S. , & Hill, C. (1997). What do prototypes prototype? In M. Helander , T. Landauer , & P. Prabhu (Eds.), Handbook of human-computer interaction (2nd ed., pp. 367-381). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

15.

Kelley, T. (2001). The art of innovation: Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm. New York: Currency Doubleday.

16.

Leonard, D. , & Rayport, J. (1997). Spark innovation through empathic design. Harvard Business Review, 75(6), 102-113.

17.

Muller, M. (1992). Retrospective on a year of participatory design using the PICTIVE technique. In Proceedings of CHI ‘92 (pp. 455-462). New York: ACM Press.

18.

Muller, M. (1993). PICTIVE: Democratizing the dynamics of the design session. In D. Schuler & A. Namioka (Eds.), Participatory design: Principles and practices (pp. 211-237). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

19.

Schrage, M. (1999). Serious play: How the world’s best companies simulate to innovate. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

20.

Vertelney, L. , & Curtis, G. (1990, April). Storyboards and sketch prototypes for rapid interface visualization. Paper presented at CHI 1990, Seattle, WA.

21.

Wagner, A. (1990). Prototyping: A day in the life of an interface designer. In B. Laurel (Ed.), The art of human computer interface design (pp. 79-84). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

22.

Weick, K. (2001). Making sense of the organization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

23.

Wong, Y. (1992). Rough and ready prototypes: Lessons from graphic design. In Posters and short talks of the 1992 SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 83-84). New York: ACM Press.