Simulation, Models and Prototype Parts

[Ramya R]

Dear Mr. Jon M. Quigley,
I had the opportunity to read your article on "Learning and Product development" and was impressed about your view-point that building prototype parts are essential to understand the real product. Coming from a software background, I was of the opinion that a sophisticated model wil serve as a panacea for all product design problems...

With Best Regards
Ramya

[JonMQuigley]

Thank you Ramya,

I have an affinity for models also, but models need two other things in my mind.

The first is customer interaction, customers say one thing about the use, but actually having a customer work the product and react with it in the situations it will be found are the best customer feedback mechanisms in my experience.

The second is the product itself, or understanding the environment beyond the customer and applies more to the physical world. We can surmise what variables and interactions of variables that matter, but often there is more than what we can see involved, to that end we subject prototype part to stimuli found in models and where the results are not congruent with the model predictions, we know we have something missing.