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The level of production quality is established by the technological solutions adopted by designers during the design stage. In order to realize a product which responds to diverse customer requirements, the designers use a lot of methods and resources. One of them is the prototyping method. The designers use the prototype to propose, test and develop their theories and solutions. This paper presents a method to optimize the prototyping process for a product in order to increase the performances of the design process. The study was conducted at University of Pitești. Two design experiments were conducted for the same product. The first experiment used conventional methods of prototyping and the second one used the rapid prototyping. We followed the evolution of parameters: cost, duration, number of iterations needed to quantify the impact of the two methods. In order to represent and analyze the performance of studied experiments there were used instruments as: DSM (Design Structure Matrix), Manhattan distance, a graphical representation tool based on the model proposed by Pahl and Beitz.