I think, thinking in prototypes rather then only sketching is certainly a promising way of designing a product. However, I have more faith in a hybrid way of designing with prototypes. Thinking in prototypes as described in the article written by Bart Eisenberg uses the prototypes merely to evaluate the state of the product at that point. It creates prototypes which you can evaluate in their 'future environment', you can hand out prototypes to people who are going to use the product, and you will get to know how they experience the product. In this way you will eliminate early errors you wouldn't find with just sketches, which is really a good thing. At those points I totally agree with the article, but why not take it a step further?
In my opinion there must be a way to get even more advantage from the prototypes. We should create a hybrid way of designing with prototypes. At my home university they are working on a project called 'Raw Shaping' (rawshaping.com). They are creating a new way of designing shapes, we should be able to change the prototypes right away, and just keep changing it till we are pleased with the result. At this point you could even use the help of future consumers of the product, and let them interfere with the design process. Those are the people who will have to use the product, their opinion should be the most important one. In this movieclip you can see the process of 'Raw Shaping'.
As you can see there is an hybrid way of designing, using the clay and computer. You can use the clay to do the raw shaping and the computer to do the fine-tuning. I think this will be very usable for all kinds of prototypes, a hybrid link between the prototype and the CAD design on the computer. In this way you can create dozens of shapes, fast and easy adjustable, and store them on your computer. I think designing is at first a tactile process, seeing and feeling the shape in reality means so much more then just looking at a 3D model on a screen. Adjusting a shape with your hands, feeling the result and repeating this process till you're satisfied, it's such a fast way of designing a raw shape.
The adjusting of the shape is actually the same thing as what Lenny Lipton calls 'trial and error', but I see no point in manufacturing dozens of prototypes, we should use them in the design process, as a design tool. Of course, you need different types of prototypes, and not all of the prototypes are as easy to adjust as the clay shown in the movie, but some people think there is a solution to that problem. This solution is called 'Claytronics', I could explain it myself, but it's easier to watch this movie:
This maybe sounds impossible, and maybe it is, but I'm sure there are ways to get even more advantage from prototypes used in a design process, they will become part of the process, maybe in the far future they will be the process itself.
As you can read I really admit that prototypes should be part of the design process, but lets not forget the pencil too. I still like to sketch and find forms with my pencil, and I think it will take a lot of time and technical improvement to eliminate the need of the pencil out of the design process. As for now, rapid prototypes are an effective and efficient way of evaluating the current state of the product, and they make it possible to eliminate errors early in the design process. However, there should be many more possibilities to make the use of prototypes part of the design process, they will become essential to future designers.
References:
Bart Eisenberg, 2004. Thinking in Prototypes, http://www.pddnet.com/article-thinking-in-prototypes/
Raw Shaping, http://www.rawshaping.com
Claytronics, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/
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