Built environment prototyping for design-value

The built environment is hindered by issues relating to laggard productivity, with practitioners looking to pursue sector-wide industrialisation and digitisation to improve this issue. Contrastingly, industries that have achieved widespread industrialisation and digitisation also possess developed prototyping cultures. Within these industries, prototyping approaches are tailored to suit the nature of the specific output product. Prototyping in the built environment acts as a tool for representation, testing, and communication. Prototyping approaches vary across the constituent disciplines with a lack of influential approaches or methods of the kind illustrated in other industries. This paper uses critical analysis to review prototyping literature from influential approaches found in engineering design, software development, and design management. These are compared to approaches used in the built environment disciples of architecture, engineering, and construction research. The findings confirm that prototyping is a value-adding activity, but suggest that prototyping cultures and outcomes in the built environment are inhibited by fragmentation that is inherent in the discipline. Future research could surround the development of prototyping approaches that enable practitioners to get the most out of the process. Such a protoyping approach would that also recognises that the creation of buildings requires both idea conceptualisation, and physical implementation to deliver quality outcomes.