Looking for prototyping inspiration? Expand your definition of what a prototype is with these very different examples made by designers at IDEO.

Building early concepts of your ideas can help you avoid costly mistakes, and build something that your users will truly love. Brendan Boyle, partner at world-renowned design firm IDEO, explains the art of prototyping in more detail, and why it’s not just an activity for designers.

In this episode of our Creative Confidence Series, IDEO Executive Design Director Chris Nyffeler chats with IDEO U Managing Director Coe Leta Stafford about the value of prototyping, how to create low-fidelity prototypes for digital products and services, and the role of technology in design. 

Chris Nyffeler is an Executive Design Director at IDEO, leading IDEO's community of interaction, visual, and user experience designers. He is also the instructor of our new class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences. As a design practitioner himself, Chris has led and worked alongside Fortune 100 executives, entrepreneurs, and IDEO teams. He's led programs to design experiences for everything from ATMs to smartphones to connected home devices. We caught up with Chris leading up to the launch of Prototyping for Digital Experiences to chat about his experience at IDEO, his journey to interaction design, and advice for others in the field.

In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, IDEO managing director and Human-Centered Service Design instructor Melanie Bell-Mayeda and IDEO U’s Coe Leta Stafford shared stories and tips about how to use service design to bring more meaningful experiences to customers and organizations.

Teachers are the innovators education has been waiting for, and design thinking can help them activate their own creativity and solve the biggest challenges in education today. In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, Coe sat down with with Sandy Speicher, Managing Director of IDEO’s education practice and a strategic adviser to the K-12 Lab Network at the Stanford d.school, to discuss design thinking in education and how teachers can be powerful change agents for schools and education as a whole.

When teams explore and iterate with five or more different ideas rather than selecting one or two ideas and moving them forward, they are 50% more likely to successfully launch.

When it comes to emerging technology, it’s often anyone’s guess what the future will hold. At IDEO U we are far from having a crystal ball and that’s why we advocate for “building to think” or, rather, making prototypes to learn how people react. To help get our heads around emerging tech, we invited our IDEO friends, IDEO CoLab, in for a Creative Confidence Series session about emerging tech (and why you should care).

In our Creative Confidence series chat with IDEO CoLab Co-Managing Director Joe Gerber, we explored the world of business prototyping. In his early days as a Business Designer at IDEO, Joe noticed that experimenting and prototyping were an essential part of IDEO’s process and became curious about prototyping something complicated and abstract like a business.

As Managing Director of IDEO CoLab, Matt Weiss is passionate about bringing design to emerging technologies early in their development. Matt and his team bring a human-centered design lens to new technology to better understand its functionality and help shape its formation.