Prototypes are literally the "vision things." They used to be about the future. Now they define our perception of the present- so much so that the challenge has become for actual products to live up to the prototypes.
In a room at IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York is a computer unlike any you have ever seen. Its futuristic frame disguises the thinness of a flat-panel display, thin keyboard and penpad, all separate parts that fit together. You can talk to it, write on it, and draw on it at the same time as your buddy works on another networked machine. IBM calls it Leapfrog, and it is a declaration of principle - a promise, a teaser, the equivalent of the show cars with which Detroit tempted us for years. It is the product of a company eager to change its image and show itself as visionary - eager to reinvent itself.
Designed by IBM's Sam Lucente, in collaboration with the company's design guru, Richard Sapper (famed for his iconic black Tizio lamp), Leapfrog is as idealized as a fashion model, as thin and sensuous as Kate Moss. IBM allows only peaks at Leapfrog, the better to lend it excitement, even stardom.
Like models in the fashion industry, prototypes have become vital to the electronics industry. And like models, prototypes combine beauty and inaccessibility in a vision of how things could be: They show reality in its best possible light and make fantasies tangible. They are dream machines.
IBM's prototypes, along with such devices as John Sculley's Knowledge Navigator and the futuristic machines sending faxes from the beach in AT&T's ubiquitous "you will" ads, are evidence that prototypes have become vital tools for creating the images of companies. Today, high-tech prototypes are about showing a company's farsightedness. Think of them as dreamware - three-dimensional models of "the vision thing." You find them, too, at NEC, where a line of "wearable" computers got the company more publicity than its real products and even at generally conservative DEC, where designer Meg Hetfield's futuristic pen-based computer, looking like a cross between a checkbook and an eyeglass case, will change the way you think about the company.
Once, prototypes were crude working test models - breadboards, rough drafts. Management wiz Tom Peters cites the benefits of producing prototypes early and testing them to head off unexpected problems. Today, some prototypes are models for looks only, others for function only, and still others for both. But prototypes have become a key element of doing business in the digital age. They show what could be - a couple of years from now - and what will be - a few months from now.
To study the prototypes of the past is to learn not only about technological history, but also about technological fiction: machines and therefore society as they might have been. About his collaboration with Richard Sapper, Sam Lucente explains, "We went from a wooden model to a working one in about six months." Today, the pattern is established: The form comes before the function.
But prototypes began as something quite different. We use the word easily today: "He's the prototype of the big tight end," John Madden will say, commenting on an NFL star. But the idea of a prototype is a modern idea: To have a prototype you first had to have a type. That meant you had to be able to make one thing identical to another, in quantity. And that, in turn, implied mass production and interchangeability.
The first call for prototypes came from the patent office. A working model was often required to prove the validity of an invention. For more than a century after the establishment of the US patent office in 1790, thousands of such models gathered dust in Washington offices and warehouses until the frugal and shortsighted Coolidge administration cleared most of them out in 1926.
Some were sold, some destroyed, but the most important of those that survive are displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. These prototypes record history. Morse's first telegraph and Bell's first telephone are bona fide relics on their own - as compelling to the music buff as any guitar at any Hard Rock Cafe. But equally fascinating are the losers, like C. Francis Jenkins's 1931 wheel-shaped mechanical/electrical television. Jenkins had the idea - explored by others in those days - of using a perforated whirling disc instead of an electron gun to paint a TV picture. It was not an idea ahead of its time.
Patent models fairly radiated confidence in the designs they embodied. Each inventor rendered his device as if it were going to change the world. But prototypes evolved to another dimension when the idea of invention changed, thanks to planned research and development. Thomas Edison did not just invent things, he invented a new concept of invention - planned and predictable invention, relying, in his famous formulation, on 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration.
The physical equivalent of the method was the research lab - called "the invention factory" - packed with machines and chemicals and eager young assistants, all to devise prototypes. It was Edison's greatest invention - beyond the importance of the light bulb or the phonograph. Previous romantic notions of invention as an uncontrollable process, a lightning bolt of inspiration, were shattered by Edison's prescription. Prototypes - rough models to test principles - were vital to his cut-and-try method.
Never comfortable with pure theory, Edison - a hands-on technologist - built model after model to test ideas. His prototypes - many of which survive today- were the raw stuff of his invention. If you drop by the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey, you see the first phonograph, with its delicate foil and wax recording cylinders, the first kinetoscopes - primitive movies in a box, for one viewer only - and many dead ends. But standing outside the brick pile of the Edison lab, you see an intriguing and abstract prototype: that of the first movie studio, the Black Maria, a tarpaper shack set to revolve on rails to follow the sun. Inside, boxers fought in sweltering heat for the early camera. The Black Maria today appears as a kind of minimalist sculpture, as if abstractly illustrating the future, at once seedy and grandiose, of the film studio.
The prototype as sales and image device was created by General Motors as the "concept car," born in 1937 when Harley Earl, the great auto designer who created the tail fin and the annual model change, declared his ambition to "leap forward" in automotive evolution. This was Earl's first creation, in collaboration with Alfred Sloan of General Motors, that began in the early 1930s. The annual model change became a September ritual in American life, as powerful and as anticipated as the World Series.
But the promise of each year's new models was deepened and romanticized by Earl's concept car notion. The first concept car, gleaming with banks of chrome speedlines, swelling fenders, and the prototype of the harp-mouth grille that would show up later on such vehicles as the Buick Roadmaster, was the prototype of a new kind of prototype. Called "the Y-job," this first "dream car" was the forerunner of a handful that would star in GM's 1950s "Motorama": a traveling show of concept cars that constituted a total inventory of American lusts and desires, shapes dredged like Dali's from the ocean of raw id.
Prototypes have a strange life cycle: they are very, very new, then suddenly they are very, very old. From novelty they pass quickly to a morning-after-the-party staleness. It takes a decent interval before they can be re-appreciated with the perspective of time. Too often, they are destroyed before that happens. The lucky ones end up in museums as alternative realities, ideals cut short by practicalities, chance, or undercapitalization, dreams now chipped, dinged, and generally cruddy - historical could-have-beens. In the context of the museum, the winners are sometimes hard to pick from the losers.
At the Smithsonian, the first telegraph is largely a construct of lumber and wire: surprisingly lean and simple. But in the Museum of American History's new Information Age exhibition, there's an Apple I - encased in a wooden box, its name carved into the wood, a ne plus ultra of hippie design. It is displayed beside several other computers of the same mid-1970s era. Asked to chose the likely winner among them, one would bet on the Sol, with its neat plastic case, its more powerful specs and its seemingly more industrial look.
At the Motorola Museum in Schaumburg, Illinois, the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, or Boston's Computer Museum, one is struck by the size and bulkiness of most landmark electronic prototypes. What could be less prepossessing than the so-called "K model" adder switch, created by Bell Labs engineer George Stiblitz in October of 1937, the first device to prove that electrical switching could be used for arithmetical computations? It was called the "K model" because Stiblitz fabricated it on his on his kitchen table, using pieces of tin from a coffee can and two Eveready No. 6 batteries.
The first HP laser for use in a printer ("krypton laser asset number 52687" reads the label at the Tech Museum) appears almost laughably huge. The mouse of the Xerox Alto computer is surprisingly blocky, suggesting in pure literalness the familiar comparison of a mouse to a bar of Ivory soap. And there is little promise in the first Xerox copy, on display at the company's headquarters, bearing a date and place name "10-22-38 Astoria" in an image nearly as faded and indistinct as that on the Shroud of Turin, and as deeply venerated by the Xerox faithful.
There is something else strange about these prototypes. As Gwen Bell of the Boston Computer Museum notes, there is a tendency to package new technologies in the containers of the old: transistors in tubes that look like their forebears - new wine in old bottles. But the package, not the content, the form, not the function, is sometimes the most important part of the modern prototype.
The rise of industrial design - aimed at finding the appropriate new packaging for new technologies - created prototypes with drama - a World's Fair streamlining of radios and cameras. The offices of Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, and Walter Dorwin Teague turned out prototypes and models that were rarely thought worth preserving, but a few made it into the design collections of the Museum of Modern Art or the Cooper-Hewitt - the Smithsonian's design museum in New York. You will find other prototypes languishing in contemporary industrial design firms such as IDEO, or frogdesign.
At frogdesign in Campbell, California, there sits on a shelf a Macintosh you never saw - called ET. It's what designer Hartmut Esslinger calls a corpse - one of many designs Apple killed. With a tiny monitor/CPU combination, and a disc slot like a mouth under the screen, it is a different personality, a parallel path of evolution, an extinct species.
Electronics, with its almost rigidly algebraic rules of transistor-density compounding and byte-per-buck price slides, made the prototype a way of business life. The business is filled with legendary stories of electronics shoved underneath tablecloths and card tables at trade shows, with every confidence that engineers would soon compress the chaotic innards into a neat and practical package.
In 1979, at a trade show, Philips showed off something called a compact disc - a cute little player on top of a table covered by a white table cloth. Beneath the tablecloth lurked a full cubic meter of electronics to make the machine work - the same electronics that reside today in your hip pocket in DiscMan form. The process has reached such a state today that, just as auto journalists now expect rides in prototype cars, electronics writers deal with prototypes, never doubting that a few copies can be translated into millions of units.
Last fall the single prototype on the North American continent of Sony's next generation MiniDisc player visited Manhattan like a head of state or rock star. Accompanied by an entourage of publicists and body guards, it rode from ad photographer's studio to magazine photographer's studio. Even with only a few prototypes in existence, Sony was confident enough of the technology and manufacturability of the device to publicly announce it.
It is almost a requirement that makers of cutting-edge digital technology show vision through detailed prototypes. We may no longer have the undiluted faith in technology of the old World's Fairs, the theme parks of prototype, but we continue to believe in mutability: Something new is always around the corner and the one who spots it first will prosper.
Gavin Ivester, who created the Apple Knowledge Navigator, Apple Guide, and other futuristic prototypes while working at Apple, now runs a product design studio called Tonic, much of whose work is devoted to prototype creation. "The idea," he says, "is to be at least ten years ahead, but reasonably practical." He takes on such projects as designing a next-generation personal digital assistant for a video created by AT&T. From a corporate standpoint, he admits, many prototypes have the function of saying, "Hey, we're cool" but also help to crystallize thinking, define real-world applications for new technologies, and influence production products - just as Earl's Y-job shaped the great highway cruisers of the 1950s.
Such firms as Tonic, GVO, IDEO, frogdesign, and others spend weeks or months and tens of thousands of dollars on prototypes, usually for specific clients but sometimes to lure new clients with dreamy visions like those from the minds of out-of-work architects.
But now a whole generation of kids learns to think in prototype mode at design schools. Design education has gone well beyond airbrushed drawings or clay models of sports cars. At Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit, students are asked to think about the technology of the future. At Art Center, one recent student project involved creating prototype products for life in a moon colony sometime in the next century - from a robotic vacuum cleaner to a holographic TV. This sort of design glows with a new kind of confidence, the confidence that R&D can provide the steady stream of technology needed to fill sleek models with real working parts.
All this is a token of how much the prototype has moved from being a thing to being an idea. Hardware increasingly lives in software. Today, more and more protoypes live inside computers. Already at studios like frogdesign, designs go straight from computers to milling machines that make solid models or cases. Three-dimensional lithography converts CAD to solid plastic. And it is not hard to imagine the day when a VR glove and helmet - Ivan Sutherland's 1964 prototype for these are at the Boston Computer museum - might allow you to pick up and turn over a new device, even punch the buttons on a prototype that exists only in code.
While the aviation industry traditionally had no way to test airplanes except for building one and flying it - "test articles," the Pentagon called such planes - a kind of landmark was reached with the B-2 Stealth bomber. That plane, its maker Northrop proudly boasts, was designed without the usual test airplane. All design work was done on a CAD/CAM system, right down to making sure that the mechanics could get to the hydraulic lines without running into electrical wires. The first physical airplane was already a production model.
And, when it comes to "the vision thing," prototypes have grown to overshadow finished product. The challenge today is for actual products to live up to the prototypes. Such devices as personal digital assistants and such ideals as VR have moved so far into the realm of concept and offer such dazzling abstract possibilities that physical devices inevitably fall far short. They live more as prototypes of the mind than 3-D devices.
So when Apple finally demonstrated a Newton MessagePad that represented a limping compromise of ideal and expense, it also showed prototypes of other versions of Newton - a yellow sports Newton, a My First Newton for kids, a hospital clipboard Newton and so on. Apple made no bones about the role of these prototypes: They were known informally as show cars. Even if the waking reality was as far from the ideal logos as the MessagePad's handwriting recognition was from the words intended, it was vital to keep the dream alive.
