Prototype is like a poem...
Prototype is like a poem...
A prototype is not a draft product.
It is a question made inhabitable — specific enough to be felt, open enough for the person inside it to bring their own meaning.
This is what a poem does. It does not describe the feeling. It finds the image that holds the feeling, and it stops there. The reader does the rest.
The reader must do the rest.
A prototype works the same way. Walk with Me is not a proposal for a product feature. It is a scene: a person walking through a dark parking structure at night, and a light coming on softly in front of them. The scene is specific. You can be inside it. You can feel whether it is right.
This is the only way to evaluate whether a design proposition is worth building. By inhabiting it. By asking whether what it holds is true.
Experience prototyping is less a set of techniques than a commitment to this kind of truth-telling — making the possible concrete enough to be tested against reality, before reality has been committed to.