Follow Your Dreams! Creating a Prototype Is as Easy as This

When developing a brand-new product or invention, one of the most important early steps in the process is going to be the development of your first prototype. This is a three-dimensional model of what you foresee your product looking like, and can be achieved using plastic prototype fabrication in Utah.

There are some people who will attempt to make their own prototype, and others who will hire manufacturers or fabricators to develop a prototype based on their designs. Plastic manufacturers, for example, are frequently brought into the prototype development process to fabricate prototypes used for initial presentations and critique.

What your prototype looks like and how detailed it is depends on the goals you have and the budget you’re working with. There’s nothing wrong with starting off with a very basic, rudimentary prototype for an initial demonstration, but pre-production prototypes used for more official purposes should generally be of higher quality and have a greater attention to detail.

Here are just a few of the primary reasons why the creation of a prototype is such an important part of the product development process:

• It allows you to test materials: An initial prototype can help you get a better sense of how certain materials will perform with your product. Say, for example, you had planned on the product being made out of metal, but you develop a plastic prototype and find it to be superior both in performance and cost—you might change your mind about the material you’ll use during large-scale manufacturing.
• It helps you perfect your design: A prototype is essentially a trial run. It’s the first time you start going from theory to actual function. By physically creating a prototype, you go beyond envisioning the product in your mind to actually putting it together and testing its functionality. This gives you a way to analyze how it will perform and what sorts of design adjustments you will need to make.
• It demonstrates your professionalism: If you go into a setting where you will be pitching your product to other professionals, it does a lot for the quality of your demonstration and the impression you give off to have a prototype on hand. It demonstrates your professionalism, and also makes your presentation more visual and hands-on—you’re not asking the viewers of your presentation to stretch their imagination nearly as much, because there’s a physical “draft” of the product in front of them.

There really aren’t any hard and fast rules for prototype development. Again, you have to work within your budget and determine just how accurate your prototype needs to be for your purposes. It’s highly recommended you work with a plastic fabricator with experience in prototype development, a company that can take your plans and ideas and turn them into the “first draft” of your physical product.

Interested in learning more about the benefits of working with a professional plastics company for plastic prototype fabrication in Utah? Contact the team at D&D Plastics today with any questions you have, or to schedule a consultation.

Categorised in: Plastic Prototypes

This post was written by Writer