Student Perceptions of an Iterative or Parallel Prototyping Strategy During a Design Competition

In engineering design, the prototyping process facilitates learning through testing, evaluation, and refinement. Designer perceptions about different approaches to prototyping may reveal how the benefits and limitations of different prototyping strategies manifest. In this paper, student perceptions of iterative and parallel prototyping approaches are examined through an undergraduate design competition. Student participants' final project reports are analyzed to determine their satisfaction with their assigned prototyping strategy. In addition, themes in participants' perceptions about the two prototyping approaches are assessed by evaluating their reports for emergent theme categorization. Results show a significant preference towards an iterative approach to prototyping despite better design performance by the parallel approach. Participants also recognize the unique benefits of each strategy. Namely, an iterative approach affords minor changes to a concept whereas a parallel approach facilitates solution space exploration. This work showcases how students perceive the benefits and limitations of iterative and parallel prototyping strategies, informing our understanding of how prototyping strategies can affect the engineering design process.