Flexibility in Representations / Racetrack Design

I've been sketching lots of maps for the Pirate Co-op game, just trying to get a feel for the design space. But it occured to me it would be really nice to have a way to be really flexible about this, to have a physical map that could be readily rearranged during playtesting.

Heroscape tiles might be nice if we ended up with a hex-based game (this is still not certain, believe it or not!). But just starting with a map with a blank grid, and then placing island / trade route / dangerous seas tiles on it could work too. Its strange, I assumed we would have a printed map, but there's really no reason that must be the case, especially not during playtesting.

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The concept of a flexible, intermediate representation of design ideas is something that I've been thinking about a lot. When you're designing, its often a matter of finding a medium that reflects the properties you're looking for and then:
1) creating a representation of your ideas in that medium
2) evaluating that representation to see if it has the qualities you're looking for
3) adjusting or creating a representation based on what you saw

Ideally, you end up in Schon's of Reflection in Action, where this all happens as a unified, creative thought process, where you're evaluating as you create.

So, you want a representation that is easy to create, but that tells you what you need to know. These are the two steps I've always focused on when thinking about this stuff, ignoring that third step of adjusting course. Maybe that's because most of the books I've seen on this subject focus on sketching, where you usually make sketch after sketch, rather than trying to adjust a previous drawing.

But what about a representation that lends itself to changing its configuration? That is, rather than sketching map after map, should I be creating a physical set of objects that can be nudged around as I see fit?

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So I was already thinking about this a bit, but what prompted me to post was seeing this show about a guy who designs racetracks. They had this footage of his studio, and I immediately started to wonder, what sort of representations would you use for this? As he pointed out, you need to consider making the course challenging to drive, interesting to watch, you need to work with the topography of the land. They showed these drawings of course layouts, but I didn't see how you could get to those just by drawing squiggle after squiggle and saying 'that looks like a good one!'

About 5 minutes later, I wasn't disappointed. They had built a topographical model of a location out of layers and layers of cardboard, and were using pins with yarn between them to lay out possible course routes. They had multiple routes in different colors, and when one guy placed this red segment, they talked about how it had this nice drop down the hill, and how the cars would really fly down it given the angle and the speed they would have. How cool is that?

The lesson I got from this was how to build prototypes so that you can readily adjust them as you're playtesting. More specifically, don't assume that the approach you're going to use in the final game is the approach you have to use for a playtest: even if you plan to use a static map in the end, tiles might do you good in the meantime. For reasons I won't get into here, I firmly believe playtesting is one of the only good ways to get feedback about a board game design, and ensuring that third "adjusting" step is as easy as possible seems like a good idea.

Is this obvious? Maybe? Its something I overlooked though, and it seems like an observation worth holding onto.

[Finally started adding labels. Will maybe go back and add them to the old ones some day.]