| Serious Play: How the World's
Best Companies Simulate to Innovate
By Michael Schrage (foreword by Tom Peters)
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999, 244 pages.
Reviewed by Bill Evans, president, Bridge Design,
Inc.
"Simulate to Stimulate" might be an appropriate mantra
for Schrage in this lively, practical book on the powerful effect
on companies, individuals, and products of a culture of abundant
prototyping. As a design manager, you probably thought you understood
modeling and prototyping. This book will give you abundant credit
for what you know, but it will also open your eyes to new ways of
using your knowledge. Design managers will find practical, real-world
examples drawn from a broad spectrum of simulation techniques and
industries (IDEO, GVO, Boeing, auto makers, financial service providers,
and more). These anecdotal examples show that it is not just the
prototype itself that matters, but also the process of creating,
criticizing, and deciding what to do with what you learn that pushes
organizations to profitable and consumer-winning products and product
development processes.
Schrage's analysis is refreshing in a world in which we are normally
assailed by CAD/CAE companies trying to sell us ever-more sophisticated
tools that sometimes make our organizations and prototypes less
flexible. He argues that these acronyms should stand for "computer-aided
Darwinism" and "computer-aided evolution." His aim
is to encourage designers to consider all prototyping tools as playthings
and to go through many generations of ideas.
Schrage also advocates the use of alternative tools on the same
problem to highlight the shortcomings of each modeling technique
and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. His examples include
"guerrilla" tactics with which you figure out the simplest,
quickest way to test an idea or to get a group of product developers
to completely change their habits. These tactics, he argues, will
often reveal better designs and new ways for the different departments
within a company to communicate among themselves and with their
customers.
Whether you prototype virtually or physically, you will find ideas
here that will stimulate you. Schrage even considers failure and
the important role it plays. This feeds into his thesis about the
effect of simulation on the organization. Good products come from
an organization that encourages risk, and that means failures will
occur. Mistakes are okay-it's how you find 'em and fix 'em that
matters. The prototyping culture affects the design process as much
as the actual physical manifestation of the model. Long live errors!
Schrage concludes that, as a manager, the first question you should
ask about modeling is "Who benefits?" His book will make
you see that the organization doing the prototyping benefits just
as much as the end user. His plea to prototype early and appropriately-an
entreaty that will be familiar to many creative professionals-also
implicitly poses a tough management question, which Schrage understandably
does not tackle: When do you quit playing and ship the product?
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