Product demonstrator: a system for up-front testing of user-related product features

Prototypes and models have been used to obtain information on detailed engineering parameters of design for quite some time. Prototypes reduce complexity in the design process by providing a platform for empirical testing of design assumptions. Unfortunately, the production of sufficiently complex prototypes for products such as hand-held mobile terminals, which incorporate both physical and data features, has been costly and time consuming. Thus it has been difficult to use them to generate up-front data such as details of customer needs. To address this problem, the notions of virtual prototypes, use of several successive prototype rounds, and partial prototypes have been put forth. The use of virtual prototypes has been useful, but the lack of a physical domain in them has been a limiting factor in product concept testing and user feedback studies. Resorting to several prototyping rounds has taken into account the need to take in customer feedback between design iterations and has allowed changes to be made, but has not addressed the cost and time consumption of these iterations. Partial prototypes and models of select product properties have been used to save on the cost and time it takes to produce a full prototype, but they have often lacked the depth needed. In this paper, the concept of product demonstrators is put forward to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual domains while retaining the flexibility and speed of the virtual prototypes. A modular demonstrator platform for performing fast demonstrations is presented as an implementation of the concept.