Start by bringing the problem down to a resource-friendly scale, make it tangible, and scale up successive demonstrations of the problem. This is the table top prototype.
You are not an expert at the outset. You become an expert. It follows that, before you are correct about the problem, you are going to be wrong about it—essentially every single time. But you will be right about many smaller problems that you solve along the way. This is how you find your way to the right solution – one small step at a time!
From the book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong by Luis Perez-Breva