Rapid Prototyping Concepts
and Structured Ideas

I needed a place to fail faster.

Coming out of a rapid prototyping workshop at the Singularity University Executive Program in the early fall of 2022, a thought occurred to me; “What works at the speed of thought faster than talking about a concept?”

New ideas are like holding a scrambled Rubik’s cube in your hands for the first time. You need to be able to keep flipping it around to get a sense of the orientation of the colored squares, first visually and then eventually building the entire state mentally. Next, you need to start to rotate one slice at a time, then start to learn the sequential steps to move colors from side A to side F. Finally, if you’ve mastered all incremental strategies for repositioning colors from various starting points, you can use your mental model of the cube in it’s scrambled state and the mental model of the process to get resolution.

We can draw a parallel analogy to working out a new conceptual idea. Our initial state of our concepts look jumbled. We need some way to change perspectives to get a sense of the entire cube. Next we need to play with strategies to transform incrementally, to learn how to bridge idea A to position A. Trying to describe that model verbally, is the quickest prototype of our final state. Doing that with other people will allow us to see both different sides of the problem, as well as provide the constraints which will help us refine our transformational steps that are repeatable to get to satisfactory “buy in” from the people we are talking to.