Prototypes are typically thought of as nearly complete products or technologies which are used to conduct system, alpha or beta testing near the end of a development process. This course is designed to expand on the idea of prototyping and teach how to employ a variety of tools as methods to inspire, contextualize, evaluate and inform any phase of any research or development activity. In the context of this course the term prototyping is being defined as the creation of something for the purpose of discovery and analysis and for communicating ideas to engage others in your work. Tools students will explore include but are not enhance the student’s creative agility and their capacity to facilitate the development of innovative solutions through the use of prototyping. As a Serve-Learn-Sustain affiliated course students be introduced to and use the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals framework to help them think more critically about the relationships between technology, society, ecology, economics and policy. Throughout the problem-framing and problem-solving process, students will be challenged to look at their problem-space by asking what are potential impacts a solution might have on sociological, economic, political and environmental factors along with considering scale and how their problem-space relates to local, regional, national and/or global variables. To achieve this, they will apply a variety of techniques such as prototyping understandings, analytical confidence analysis, powers of ten and the ripple effect to help them better recognize and mitigate unintended outcomes that frequently occur from designing solutions stemming from an ill define problem space. This course is intended to better prepare students to envision multi-tiered approaches to address complex problems through a lens of compassion to ultimately design a more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable future.