  Aiming to help researchers capture output from the early stages of
engineering design projects, this article presents a new research tool for
digitally capturing physical prototypes. The motivation for this work is to
collect observations that can aid in understanding prototyping in the early
stages of engineering design projects, and this article investigates if and how
digital capture of physical prototypes can be used for this purpose.
Early-stage prototypes are usually rough and of low-fidelity and are thus often
discarded or substantially modified through the projects. Hence, retrospective
access to prototypes is a challenge when trying to gather accurate empirical
data. To capture the prototypes developed through the early stages of a
project, a new research tool has been developed for capturing prototypes
through multi-view images, along with metadata describing by whom, why, when
and where the prototypes were captured. Over the course of 17 months, this
research tool has been used to capture more than 800 physical prototypes from
76 individual users across many projects. In this article, one project is shown
in detail to demonstrate how this capturing system can gather empirical data
for enriching engineering design project cases that focus on prototyping for
concept generation. The authors also analyse the metadata provided by the
system to give understanding into prototyping patterns in the projects. Lastly,
through enabling digital capture of large quantities of data, the research tool
presents the foundations for training artificial intelligence-based predictors
and classifiers that can be used for analysis in engineering design research.
