Prototyping Prototyping: A Preface

by: Christopher M. Kelty

Prototyping Prototyping, began as a conference publication that was finished before the conference.

Its goal was to be a “prototype” of a conference on prototyping cultures.  Participants were invited 2 weeks ahead of time to submit a short piece, and nearly everyone involved did so.  I’m tempted to say: prototyping works.

The rub of course, is that this is a group of people who, at best, each have different ideas of what a prototype is or why it might be a salient figure of our contemporary experience. There is a wealth of practical, empirical material to gather and analyze about how prototypes work in different domains (design, architecture, art, metrology, engineering, social science), and also a definite conceptual problematic picked out by the term “prototyping.”  It concerns innovation, participation, intellectual property, collaboration, democracy, interdisciplinarity, software, design, ethnography, sociality… just to name a few of the limits and terms proposed herein.

Alberto Corsín Jimenez and Adolfo Estalella, have been either generous or foolhardy to let me prototype their conference, maybe both. 

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Prototyping Prototyping: a pre-conference publication

A publication organized prior to the conference and constructed in time (though only barely) to circulate there. For some, this experiment provided a way to reflect on the relationship of presentation and writing, and the ways that conferences structure and circulate expectations about what kind of work can and should be done there, as opposed to through another process.

Download a high quality version (7MB pdf).

The Long History of Prototypes

The Long History of Prototypes

The conference organisers Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella state at the beginning of their invitation: “prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times”.

What I want to focus on is what the words “visibility” and “recent times” may mean in the above sentence. The problem here is that the conference description can be read to imply that the practices of prototypes and prototyping have become more prominent, widespread, and important “in recent times.” Alternatively, it can also be read to imply that prototypes have always been important, but that they merely became more visible at some (recent) point in time. If the former is true, we need a history of prototyping and to ask: why and when the increase and qualitative switch of prototyping took place? If the latter is true, it amounts to asking: why do we suddenly recognize the importance of prototyping? Obviously, a mixture or a connection between these two interpretations is possible. However, I want to propose, that it is predominantly the second, discursive interpretation that I think we can observe now.

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The prototype: a sociology in abeyance

by: Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella

CSIC, Spanish National Research Council

Could we speak of a saint as a prototype for a religious movement or of a clue as a prototype for a crime?

Writing in the early 20^th century, philosopher Max Scheler thought that heroes, saints and geniuses played a prototypical role for larger models of social organisation.[1] Scheler was interested in the distribution of ethical values across societies. Insofar as a saint was a role model for society, his character and charisma would indeed count as prototypical of certain value structures. The prototype carried a combined sociology of leadership and organisation. It released charismatic and transcendental values of significance for society as a whole. It spilled-over or ‘externalised’, as today’s economists might put it, ethical goodies. The prototype as a public good.[2]

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If I were the ethnographer…

by: Marilyn Strathern

To what might an anthropologist wish to attach the term prototype?

Prompted by Christopher Kelty’s reference to a conference publication preceding the conference, I recall a slim volume I brought out before a short seminar series held in 2004.[1] The volume does not really count as a prototype since it was not meant to prefigure the seminars; the programme notes refer to it as ‘background’.  It simply laid out some of the thoughts that had prompted the series.

The seminar itself was another matter.  This consisted of four half-day colloquia (each with two panels of four presenters and discussants) followed by a one-day Interdisciplinary Design Workshop intended to treat each colloquium as raw material for modelling process and output.[2] The seminar was deliberately set up as a kind of prototype, although that term was not used: the series (dubbed ‘Social property and new social forms’) was presented as an ‘experiment’ in interdisciplinarity, and a paper written just after it got under way[3] talked of the anthropologist’s ‘indirection’ and at one point of a ‘rehearsal’.

Indirection can be quickly explained. 

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The Charismatic Prototype

by: Alain Pottage, LSE

Prototyping is a charismatic figure: no sooner does one have it in mind than one begins to see it at work everywhere. This is testimony to the astuteness of the organizers’ vision, and the reflexive twist of Chris’s call to prototype ‘prototyping’ invites us to explore the ‘prototyping moment’ that is seized in their vision. I start from a specific theory of prototyping; namely, the classical patent law doctrine of ‘reduction to practice’. Legal doctrine offers a somewhat dusty, parochial, and involuted take on prototyping, but it nonetheless develops the rare thing that is a sustained and evolved discourse on prototyping. Doctrine is not ‘theory’ in the sense that critical scholars might understand it, but that fact is itself salient to any reflection on our ‘prototyping moment’.

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The Law of Patents for Useful Inventions by William C. Robinson (1890)

Of Promises and Prototypes: the archeology of the future

by: Lina Dib, Rice University

“It’s just we wanted, we needed something for the deployment which would kind of work in a general way. [...] So there were problems with it, it’s not a kind of definitive answer, but it certainly found its uses.”

Drawing on the analogy of a box filled with mementos, stored under the bed, or in the attic, in 2008 Microsoft Research developed and tested a prototype they termed the Family Archive. The archive as a unit looked like a small wooden desk and consisted of an interactive touch interface, which was part screen, part scanner, and part digital storage for the scanned images. Using the family archive, test users could upload pictures and scan images of objects around their home for later retrieval.

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The End of Innovation (As We Knew It)

by Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University

‘The future arrives sooner here.’ I’m driving my car down Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto, California one evening around 1995 and I hear this assertion on U.S. National Public Radio, spoken by a Silicon Valley technologist who’s being interviewed.  It elicits a familiar response – a certain tightening in my stomach, a bodily resistance to being hailed into this presumption of avant-gardism, with its attendant mandate to enact the future that others will subsequently live.

These words reiterate a past, in the form of a diffusionist model of change that works, in turn, to reproduce the neocolonial geographies of center and periphery that (in the mid 1990s at least) underwrote the Silicon Valley’s figuration as central to the future of everywhere.  But we know now that centers and margins are multiple and relative, and futures can only be enacted in what Anna Tsing names “the sticky materiality of practical encounters … the makeshift links across distance and difference that shape global futures – and ensure their uncertain status” (2005: 1-2). These encounters and links happen within circulatory systems characterized by specific moments of boundary-making and transversal movement, events that we are just beginning to articulate in ways other than through the simple tropes of local knowledge or global flows.  Moreover, as Tsing also observes, those who claim to be in touch with the universal are notoriously bad at seeing the limits and exclusions of their own knowledge practices (ibid: 8).

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Prototyping Prototyping :: Second Iteration

by: Lucy Suchman

Our conference prototype – the document created by Chris – had the prototypical characteristic of just-in-time production, which meant that I’ve only been able to engage with it properly after the fact. Doing so was a pleasure, and leaves me wishing now for another iteration of the conference. But at least ARCEpisode2 provides a form of that.

My contribution to ‘Prototyping Prototyping,’ Chris points out, fails to mention prototyping. This is admittedly a notable absence, so in this next iteration I want to try to account for it, at least briefly, as well as to acknowledge some of the things that I learned from the last iteration; that is, both our meeting together in Madrid, which Alberto and Adolfo generously hosted, and the document that Chris has assembled for us.

First the missing prototype. My contribution was perhaps more in the way of a response to the presuppositions of the prototype, entangled as it is in discourses of future making within specific histories of Euro-American design. I’m captured by Michael Guggenheim’s proposition that “we are not witnessing the recent invention of prototyping, but the invention of prototyping as a positive, celebratory discourse” (51).

Michael reminds us of the place of the prototype in the professionalization of making things, and I’ve participated directly in this in the context of my own professional life as a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1979 to 1999. During that period I engaged critically with objects identified as prototypes (for example, an ‘expert system’ designed in the 1980s), and embraced the prototype in my own practice (in the form of the ‘case-based prototype’, a central object in our iterative crafting of an ethnographically-based process of co-design in the 1990s).

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Demo for Democracy

by: Javier Lezaun

Suppose you wanted to test the reality of democracy. Tired of claims and counter-claims, of endless debates about ideals and aspirations, and deeply unconvinced by the arguments of political philosophers, you would like to produce some real, hard facts; to verify, once and for all, that democracy really exists – that it can be successfully built and made to work.

Would it be possible, perhaps, to build a democratic prototype? A device that would demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt or ideological skepticism, that that most fragile of political forms can truly survive in this world? Could we fabricate a demo to make visible, tangible and testable the viability and inner workings of democracy?

The psychologist Kurt Lewin is famous for having produced such a demo.

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Protoyping Democracies

Experimental Studies in the Social Climates of Groups

A film by Kurt Lewin. Discussed in Javier Lezaun’s “Demo for Democracy”

Infra(proto)types In the Air

by: Nerea Calvillo

Presentation as a prototype itself: opens questions through the material of In the Air, a project which makes visible the components of the air.

A degree of skill and experience is necessary to effectively use prototyping as a design verification tool. (Wikipedia)

Prototypical methodology.

A  prototype is generally object oriented, but it can be applied as well to a methodology. In the Air has been developed mainly through international collaborative workshops, held in Madrid, Budapest and Santiago de Chile. Attended by students and professionals from many different fields, origins and ages, different strategies for production, excitement and  participation have been tested.

What is the level of adaptiveness of a prototype? Can it be produced by non experts?

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Prototypes in Design: Materializing Futures

by: Alex Wilkie

The two excerpts that follow are drawn from my Ph.D. research User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study. The thesis is an examination of the role of multiple users in user-centered design (UCD) processes and is based on a six-month ethnographic field study of designers employed to apply the principles and practices of UCD as part of the research and development efforts of a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The central argument of this thesis is that multiple users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio- cultural life that they bring into view. ‘Excerpt One’ forms part of an introduction into an empirical study of a health and fitness prototype being designed to address the increasing prevalence of obesity in North American and Western Europe. Excerpt two is drawn from the conclusion of my thesis and points to how prototyping, within user-centered and participatory design practices, can be understood as a material and formal method for managing the future.

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Prototyping relationships: on techno-political hospitality

by: Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella, CSIC, Spanish National Research Council

When drafting the original call for papers that led to the ‘Prototyping cultures’ conference, we noted that the figure of the ‘prototype’ had recently emerged as a currency of explanation and description in a number of para-laboratory contexts: from classical industrial and engineering sites to contemporary medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots and open collaborative workshops, online and offline. As we put it then, the notion of the experimental was witnessing a shift from knowledge-site to social process, with sociality and social exchange often becoming the limit-tests of experimentation itself. Prototyping, then, as both a means and an end of social reproduction.

Now if prototyping is no longer simply a modality of object-production or object-eventification, but a contemporary expression of how certain social relationships invest in their own self-understanding and self-elicitation, then it remains to be explained how such relationships conceive their own conditions of possibility. If we are no longer prototyping artefacts but societies, what makes in practice a good prototypical society?

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Cross-Cultural Partnership: TEMPLATE and HOWTO

[From The Cross Cultural Partnership website. Discussed by James Leach in his presentation.--ed]

DRAFT version 0.3, September 2007

Preamble

The cross-cultural partnership template is designed to help potential collaborators to reach understanding and agreement on the terms of their collaboration.

In many contexts people look to the law to establish or enforce a ‘safe space’ in which collaborative relationships may flourish. Good intention is more fundamental than law or codes of conduct. Nonetheless, legal agreements and faith in the law can facilitate the establishment of relationships where trust is yet to be established.

Here we offer a template which draws upon the law: the result of long-term consideration of issues around collaboration in different situations and arenas. The template draws specifically and intentionally upon understandings abstracted from established social practices and from licenses developed for digital creations.

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Para-sites: a Proto-Prototyping Culture of Method?

by: George Marcus, UC Irvine

[this text discusses the "Para-Sites" project of the Center for Ethnography and it's first event, on death penalty mitigation (see exhibit Y) -- ed.]

Classic anthropological ethnography, especially in its development in the apprentice project/dissertation form, was designed to  provide answers, or at least  data, for questions that  anthropology had for it. Nowadays, anthropology itself does  not pose these  questions. Other domains of discussion and analysis do—some academic or  interdisciplinary in the conventional sense; others not—and thus it  is  a contemporary burden of projects of anthropological research—and especially apprentice ones—to identify these question-asking  domains—also, domains of reception for  particular projects of research — as part of learning the techniques of research itself. 

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The Para-site in Ethnographic Research Projects

A Project of the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine

While the design and conduct of ethnographic research in anthropology is still largely individualistic, especially in the way that research is presented in the academy, many projects depend on complex relationships of partnership and collaboration, at several sites, and not just those narrowly conceived as fieldwork. The binary here and there-ness of fieldwork is preserved in anthropology departments, despite the reality of fieldwork as movement in complex, unpredictable spatial and temporal frames. This is especially the case where ethnographers work at sites of knowledge production with others, who are patrons, partners, and subjects of research at the same time.

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A prototype para-site event: death penalty mitigation

by George Marcus, in coversation with Jesse Cheng

[This exhibit relates to the "Parasites" project discussed by George Marcus. --ed.]

The first Para-site event at the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine occurred on November 5,2006. Jesse Cheng, an advanced graduate student, studied a movement among activist lawyers to mitigate the death penalty in capital cases. A practicing lawyer himself, Cheng worked with them and in other directions that their activities suggest to study the operations of the death penalty through the para-ethnographic, descriptive-analytic work that the mitigation lawyers produce in their advocacy . He conducted his own investigation through the forms of their investigation. This is the analogous space of the classic ‘native point of view’, but without a compass in traditional ethnographic practices to do this kind of research that requires collaborative conceptual work. This work needs a context, a space, a set of expectations and norms, better than the opportunistic conversations that occur in just ‘hanging out’. The para-site experiment is intended to be a surrogate for these needs of contemporary research that are certainly anticipated in practice but still without norms and forms of method. It encourages addressing issues of design before a concept of design has reinvented the expectations of pedagogy in anthropological training. Undoubtedly, the para-site will take different shapes and participations between the field and the conference room in other dissertation projects. But in all cases, it is a response to the imperative to materialize collaborative forms in contemporary ethnographic research.

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