Excerpt from Evaluating Prototyping Technologies, for Product Design Prototyping is one of the most critical activities in new product development. Firms that design mechanical and electro-mechanical products confront a variety of difficult issues in their prototyping activities. Some of these issues are tactical: For a given part, how can a choice among fabrication technologies be made? Some of the issues are strategic: Where should investments in new prototyping technology be focused? How can new and existing prototyping technologies be evaluated? We believe that there are useful conceptual frameworks and fundamental relationships that can be developed and used to support prototyping decisions, even though broad generalizations are likely to fail in some particular situations. Such a framework is particularly important today as lead times in product development become more critical [fitzgerald87, Ulrich91] and as novel prototyping technologies emerge [dickerson88, Kutay90, Lindsay90]. This paper describes research addressing these issues. Our primary goal has been to develop a systematic method of evaluating prototyping processes in order to determine the best process for a given situation. A secondary goal has been to map the space of prototyping processes in order to determine future process development needs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.