This publication presents a synthetic prototype environment to facilitate and stimulate the interaction with industry 4.0 testbed. The proposed solution facilitates a sandboxing approach to support multi-criterion and multi-stakeholder decision making with respect to the configuration challenges in the development of a production environment. The synthetic prototyping environment combines a real tangible scaled version of a (potential) production environment with virtual elements to quickly (re)configure (potential) environments and review the consequences of changes. The solution provides both personalised (AR/VR) and collective visualisations, and (collaborative) interactions with all stages of the digital system reference, enabling an effortless change of perspectives between the digital master, digital prototype and digital twin.