Prototyping

One commonly recurring term in the discourse of labs, design, and maker culture is “prototyping.” A prototype is a design model that serves as an experimental future-projection—“an invented, innovative device introduced to the public more like a proposal for further development to be used or manipulated, than as a unique, stable piece to be contemplated.” Studying how prototyping functions can provide important insights into how labs harbor experimental activity and how they work as collectives. In terms of studying the discourse around prototypes, the championing of them tells us much about the imaginary of the hybrid lab because it emphasizes particular values, such as an emphasis on the production of something that functions and as well as the way prototyping requires and values collaboration, bottom-up emergence, and cooperation as part of social creation in making.50 In some cases, the lab becomes the spatialized manifestation of what the prototype already signified. As Claudia Mareis and Jamie Allen outline in relation to the use of the term lab in Critical Media Lab (Basel): “[the lab] elicits collaborative working styles, open methods and central notions of testing, trials, enquiry, demonstration, evaluation. The lab is a space where things are unready, unfinished, at risk and without known utility.”51 Hence, there is also a link from prototyping to the key techniques of Experimenting and Testing.

It is clear that the particular usefulness of the concept of the prototype lies in its propensity for flexibility and speed. It is often associated with rapid development techniques, such as computer assisted design (CAD), additive technologies like 3D printing, the fab lab-model, or, in less technologically intense scenarios, paper prototyping. But prototyping techniques and facilities are also part of methodological thinking in media and speculative design. The already earlier mentioned (see 3-D Printing) Humanities Maker Lab (Mlab) at Victoria University in Canada is here a proof of concept in itself; as they explain, the prototyping and fab labs cater to many sorts of uses where technological infrastructure turns to methodological experiments in media studies:

We have two modest spaces on the UVic campus: a modeling and prototyping lab in the Technology Enterprise Facility (TEF) and a fabrication lab in Visual Arts. The TEF space is dedicated primarily to computer work, including physical computing, programming, and scanning. We also hold meetings there, and we co-author publications in that space, too. The Visual Arts space is for work with hand tools as well as various types of machine work: laser cutting, printing, milling, and routing. If we are reconducting historical lab experiments (e.g. magnetic recordings on piano wire from 1898), which we often do for the Kits project, then we use the Visual Arts space as well. This existence in two spaces, across two faculty (Fine Arts and Humanities), really enriches our research. When combined, the two environments profoundly shape how we practice and share media history.52

The context of the Mlab is intriguing because it switches prototyping from future-facing innovation work onto the track of historical and media-archaeological methodologies. Reconstructed and sometimes slightly speculative experiments with historical source material produce a tactile, sensorial take on media history: from documents to artefacts, from practices of critical close reading to aesthetic ways of investigating the material culture of earlier, pre-digital media culture, by way of digital prototyping tools.

The current popularity of prototyping as a practice in contemporary design and maker theory also facilitates a more robust consideration of the ambivalent history of labs in design practice. Whether desired or not, the particular horizon of prototyping situates contemporary labs as part of the wider cultural history of design and knowledge-production. Though some hybrid labs may try to differentiate themselves from the more market-driven aspects of the media lab legacy, their practices, spaces and methodologies such as prototyping tie them to the mainstream of contemporary lab practice. Walter Gropius’ statement about how the Bauhaus workshops functioned as “laboratories in which prototypes of products suitable for mass production and typical of our time are carefully developed and improved” links the collaborative workshops of the modernist avant-gardes to current business-driven design discourse.53 In the context of innovation discourse, “prototype” is part of the connective tissue that links art practice to the form of creative engineering typical of the California ideology and Silicon Valley discourse. Though critical art discourses often invoke prototyping (with its connotations of the open-ended nature of the experiment) as a gesture of resistance to more romantic forms of art practice, it was already part of engineering development pedagogical discourse, as Fred Turner narrates:

In a 1990 manual for developers entitled Prototyping, Roland Vonk argued that building a working if buggy software system could transform the requirements definition phase of system development. The prototype could become an object, like an architect’s model, around which engineers and clients could gather and through which they could articulate their needs to one another. It would speed development, improve communication, and help all parties arrive at a better definition of requirements for the system.54

As we have documented elsewhere in this book, many of the values to which contemporary media art aspires, such as play, intuition, future-orientation, and creative thinking have been part of industry-focused development since the Cold War. This version of the lab imaginary is still going strong and has characterized the media lab-creative economy nexus since the 1990s.

Prototyping can also transform arguments about methodology and philosophy. As Denisa Kera argues, echoing points about critical making, “[c]ollaborative and artisan prototypes built in the so called hackerspaces and DIYbio labs around the world offer a convergence between philosophy and design and connect the creative practices of thinking and doing.”55 In Kera’s use, the prototype becomes the performative terminological glue for a variety of labs and practices such that prototypes are not reducible to one particular technological kit, but instead they are more of a politically tuned project that is itself formative of a different attitude to knowledge.