RAPID-PROTOTYPING LIFE
When my husband and I started talking this past summer about going on a "sabbatical" of sorts for a few months I was deep into an ilab project for a client and couldn't help thinking about our potential leave in the language of innovation.
The advantages of rapid prototyping in the context of business and technical innovation are well-documented, the biggest perhaps being the ability to test end-user reaction without the up-front investment to actually create the product or service. What you're creating with a prototype is, essentially, a simulacrum of the product or service--something that seems real, mimicking at least one aspect of the real product or service you'd like to test--but is actually just a shell of the real thing that is faster, cheaper, and easier to produce.
One big challenge with rapid prototyping is that there tends to be an inverse correlation between ease of prototypability and the stakes involved. In general, the bigger the investment the actual product or service will require, the harder it is to get people to try to simulate and test it. It's a lot easier to prototype, say, a digital app than a nuclear power plant, so we're often inclined to prototype the app but just take our best guess on the power plant, even though the consequences of making a bad decision re: the power plant are like to be astronomically harder and more expensive to correct downstream.
I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that it is worth the effort to try and prototype the power plant; that--while you should absolutely prototype the app too--it's actually more important to prototype the power plant; that just because something is hard to prototype does not mean you can't or shouldn't try; that low-fidelity is infinitely better than no-fidelity.
Life--that is, where you live, in terms of city, neighborhood, and apartment/house--seems to have way more in common with the power plant. Decisions tend to be long-term, expensive-to-get-out-of, and difficult to try-before-you-buy--it's something, in short, we should absolutely make the effort to prototype but almost never do. It usually takes years if you want to "try out" a few different cities in any meaningful way. No one lets you live in an apartment for a few weeks before you decide whether you want to rent or buy it (kind of a cool idea though). Decisions are often highly-influenced by glamour--by persuasive cognitive illusion.
We are all the end-users of our own lives, but what we think we want often turns out to be different from what we actually want.
I was excited to try it, to rapid-prototype life before making any kind of long-term decision. My husband and I factored in a few weeks of designated "vacation" time into the sabbatical, but built in three month-long stays. A month is long enough to really "live" somewhere vs. traveling; it's long enough to have days where you want to do precisely nothing and, perhaps more importantly, days where you will have to do things you don't want to do (e.g., laundry, grocery shopping). It's long enough to strip the glamour from a place and see it for what it really is. But it's short enough that, if you see something you really don't like, you don't have to live with it for too long; it's short enough to log these preferences and try to correct them fairly quickly in the next monthly iteration. We spent a month in (1) a rural town - Belfast, Maine, (2) a small-mid-size city - Nice, France, and (3) a non-NYC big city - Paris, France. Simultaneously, we experienced living in (1) a residential neighborhood, (2) an "old city" pseudo-residential neighborhood, and (3) a primarily commercial neighborhood, and (1) a huge house, (2) a studio even smaller than what we had in NYC, and (3) a very spacious one-bedroom apartment.
It was low-fidelity, of course. Life is just different when you don't have a day job, and while I spent a fair amount of time writing, we didn't really even try to control for this. Not working is kind of the point of a sabbatical. We definitely did some touristy things outside of designated vacation time.
But even so, in terms of developing a more informed perspective, a deeper personal understanding of what I want in a city/town, a neighborhood, and an abode, I think the experiment resoundingly supported my ongoing hypothesis that a low-fidelity prototype is way better than no prototype at all. I now know, for instance, that I infinitely prefer having a washing machine but no dryer inside an apartment to having both in a communal space shared by the building. I care more about specific neighborhood than greater city. Light and views matter a lot. Size, less than I would have thought (mess, like work, expands to fill the space you allow it), but it is important to have at least one very comfortable, cozy place.
We're leaving Paris tomorrow, and I have no regrets. I recognize how unusual it is and fortunate we were to be able to do something like this, but for anyone who can, I highly recommend it.