In product development, prototyping is always necessary. But there are areas where prototyping should not be used, these include:
- Some regulatory instances require you to have the end product materials before they will test your product
- Don\’t try to alleviate a risk in your product without understanding the risks you’re taking with your prototype process – a good example trying to test your waterproof housing with and SLA or FDM 3D printed model. Unless you understand the process you can waste a lot of time building and tuning a prototype that may never work, don’t test the entire prototyping process and devise a way to make an FDM printed part waterproof when you’re really just looking to see if your waterproofing scheme will work or not.