Prototyping everything
On rough drafts, sacrificial concepts, and designing your way through uncertainty
The prototype has become a kind of design cliché: a mid-fi screen, a clickable Figma, a cardboard box labeled “pretend this is an MRI machine.” But talk to enough designers, and you realize prototyping isn’t just a phase in the process—it’s a mindset. A way of asking questions. Of making a hypothesis visible. Of testing a life before living it.
Charlota Blunarova is one of those designers. With a background in industrial and brand design, she’s prototyped everything from personalized skincare startups to luxury retail experiences (including one made entirely of IKEA furniture). Now based in Prague, she brings that same ethos to Web3, AI, and early-stage ventures.
We spoke recently about how prototyping shapes her work—and her life. The conversation left me thinking about the ways we navigate ambiguity, and what it means to build without knowing where exactly we’re headed.
The prototype is not the product
At IDEO, where Charlota worked for several years, there was an unofficial rule: never go to a meeting without a prototype. It didn’t need to be polished. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be.
“A prototype is a question embodied,” Charlota tells me. “It’s not about validation—it’s about exploration. What are you trying to learn?”
In one project for a Swiss cosmetics manufacturer, she and her team started with sacrificial concepts: quick, messy sketches of ideas meant to be thrown away. Skincare synced to your zodiac sign. A daily cream-dispensing “mini lab.” Something tied to your menstrual cycle. These weren’t real products—they were provocations.
The goal wasn’t to win consensus. It was to generate reaction: What surprised them? What confused them? What delighted them enough to ask follow-up questions?
From there, they moved into higher fidelity: dermatologist consultations, custom-blended creams, even a Google Form made to mimic the eventual app experience. But they kept things intentionally scrappy. They hired a dermatologist to sit in their office and give skincare consultations to a test group. Everyone on the team—from design researchers to business designers—and even the client’s executives got their hands dirty, packing personalized creams into sample packages.
Each prototype was a way to surface insight, not just approval. By letting the executives experience the prototype firsthand, they carried the learnings much deeper than if they’d just seen a slide deck. They could better imagine what bringing such an offer to market would truly entail.
“You start wide, then narrow,” she says. “You don’t overcommit too early. You treat each version as something you might throw away.”
Fidelity is a trap
There’s a temptation—especially in digital product design—to skip the sketch. To show something high-fidelity and mistake it for being done. But Charlota warns against this: “My industrial design background helped me understand fidelity better. When you’re building physical things, you naturally go through rougher versions first. In digital, that step often gets skipped.”
Charlota’s team once worked with a luxury fashion brand to prototype a new boutique experience. Rather than mock something up in Figma or render a sleek 3D store, they rented a space in Paris, drove to IKEA, and built it—sparse and scrappy, using real product but low-fidelity everything else.
“We were worried it would look unaligned to the luxury-feel of the brand,” Charlota says. “But the rawness actually helped. Customers gave more honest feedback. They weren’t reacting to a finished space—they were reacting to an idea.”
Here again, they brought in the brand executives to role-play as sales assistants, serving actual customers in the makeshift space. “Because the space wasn’t high fidelity, it helped us not fixate on unnecessary details like the color finish on tables or whether the lighting was perfectly on-brand,” notes Charlota. “Instead, we could focus on the aspects of service design we were testing—like whether we could leave expensive jewelry outside of secure vitrines to encourage our customers to explore.”
There’s a lesson here for anyone presenting work for feedback: When something looks final, people treat it like it is. But when it looks open, they treat it like a conversation. Polish closes conversations. And in the worst cases, it performs certainty where there is none.
Flying long-haul in a prototype
Some prototypes are even more immersive. One of IDEO’s legendary prototypes involved reimagining the business-class experience for Lufthansa. They didn’t start with wireframes or service maps. They built a section of airplane seating and invited people to roleplay a five-hour flight, complete with meals, interactions, and friction.
“It wasn’t just about seat comfort,” Charlota says. “They were testing everything—from boarding cues to digital prompts to how it felt to receive help.”
Prototyping, in this case, wasn’t about speed. It was about fidelity of experience. And even then, the fidelity wasn’t visual—it was behavioral.
The AI-powered sketch
Charlota’s current work often blends brand design and emerging tech. She’s especially interested in how generative tools can accelerate the early phases of exploration.
In a recent one-day brand sprint for healthcare startup onno, she used Midjourney and Visual Electric to generate multiple illustration styles. Within hours, she had four distinct directions for the client to react to. That allowed the team to pick a vibe quickly and confidently—then bring in a (human) illustrator to build it out.
“It’s like a moodboard, but faster,” she says. “You’re not stuck staring at a blank screen or exploring stock photo libraries, attempting to express to the client, ‘imagine an illustration of a doctor, but styled like this illustration of burrito.’” By giving her clients more realistic mockups sooner, Charlota can get them excited and bought into an idea.
AI is reducing the latency between idea and artifact. Tools like Midjourney, Claude, and GPT-4o aren’t shortcuts to finished work, but accelerants to getting started. “It’s still about the thinking,” she says. “AI just helps you visualize faster.” Once people can see it, they can respond.
Prototyping your way through life
Charlota doesn’t just prototype brands—she prototypes decisions. Where to live. How to work. Whether to buy that new armchair. “We taped the armchair outline on the floor,” she says. “Then we put a normal chair there and asked, do we actually sit here? Is this where we read books? If not, we don’t buy it.”
They did the same with neighborhoods—living in different areas short-term before settling. She prototyped her career, too. Early on, she paused her studies and tried three internships—industrial, graphic, and UX design—before deciding what direction to pursue. She never finished her master’s. She didn’t need to.
“Before making a big decision, we just ask: What’s the smallest version of this we can try?”
This mindset—try small, learn fast, iterate—has roots in design, but it works anywhere. Want to freelance? Make a landing page. Thinking about switching careers? Talk to someone already doing the thing. Want to grow your hair out? Use AI to visualize it.
“It’s easy to get stuck waiting for certainty,” she says. “But when you prototype, you give yourself permission to just try.”
From kale logos to Chindōgu
Charlota’s first major prototype wasn’t for a client. At 23, she applied for an internship with a cover letter full of Chindōgu—the Japanese art of designing ingenious inventions that solve everyday problems in the most inconvenient possible way. Think chopsticks with a fan to cool your noodles, or umbrellas for your shoes. “They’re not supposed to be practical,” she says. “They’re ideas disguised as objects.”
Years later, that playful energy still shows up in her work—like a prototype logo made of fresh kale, built to test one question: How long will this survive?
Expert perspective
This ethos of rough-first prototyping is gaining momentum. On Twitter, serial entrepreneur with a green thumb for consumer growth, Nikita Bier wrote:
“After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't: Having a full-time designer in the room at all times…You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time.”
Charlota replied with a nod to IDEO’s prototype-at-every-meeting mantra—and shared a few of the more unconventional forms her own prototypes have taken: refillable skincare jars, injection packaging, a cardboard MRI machine. The format changes. The function doesn’t.
Try before you decide
The future isn’t just high-fidelity—it’s high-agency. In a world where AI tools can help conjure moodboards and working prototypes, the value isn’t in making—it’s in knowing what to make next. That starts with asking better questions, testing early, and staying curious longer.
Prototype your ideas. Prototype your projects. Prototype your life.
You don’t have to build the whole thing to find out if it works. Just bring a sketch, a taped outline, or an IKEA boutique. That’s usually enough to begin.
—Carly
I just wanted to say, this is what I needed to read today
Oh my GOD CARLYYY you are SPEAKING TO ME RIGHT NOW