THE FOLLOWING TAKES inspiration from Liz Sanders and Pieter
Jan Stappers’ recent metahistorical editorial article which periodiz-
es design as:

19808 - expert discipline-specific design of products on the
basis of market research

2010s ~interdisciplinary designing of interactive experiences
on the basis of participatory research through practice

204.08 ~ generalized co-design of sustainable systems [21]

In this kind of visioning, a key shift is the movement of prototyping
from a late stage testing device in the 1980s, through being a more
front-end innovation tool currently, to designs, now understood as
systems rather than things, being a kind of perpetual prototype. I
would like to trouble this aspiration by taking into consideration
some current design process trends. The intention is to ask about
appropriate kinds of prototyping giving present and future risks.

IMAGINING AND REALIZING

Designing is the process of making futures (see the important
Open University textbook Man-Made Futures, [8]). There are at
least two distinct aspects to this process. Each aims at a different
sense of “the possible” or what it means “to create.” One is disrup-
tively innovative; it seeks to break with how things currently are,
open up the new. The other is more instrumentally pragmatic; it
seeks to work out how current things might be transformed, what it
is practicable to make.

Ideally, designers are equal parts fantasists and realists. They
can imagine the most far-fetched unreal things; but then they can
also focus on questions of practicability, how to make those imag-
ined things real. Designing should be a dialectic between to these
two different kinds of possibility.

Designers have tools and skills to manage this dialectic, tech-
niques that give the expertise of designing its distinctiveness. All of
these are ways of making futural possibilities partially real in the
present so that they can be evaluated and detailed—chief among
these are: prototypes.

VISUAL PROTOTYPING

The term “design” refers etymologically to the process of drawing.
Sketching services both sides of the designing dialectic. Visual
perception’s rush to associate marks on pages or screens with
represented things means that drawing is a creative process,
generating new possibilities even to the mark maker [14]. Hence
“visual thinking,” where the emergent image seems to back-talk
to designer abductively. On the other side, visual representations
of possible designs become stages for a series of thought-experi-
ments about the material feasibility of design. Designers, skilled at
reading visualized designs (like plans, elevations, exploded views,
mechanism or joinery details, etc), can make assessments about
buildability, operability, etc, of an imagined design.

Design-through-visualization was certainly a major break-
through in how humans made futures. The seminal publications
of John Chris Jones and Christopher Alexander suggested that
the whole scale and pace of modernization depended on the

“creative leaps” and “virtual prototyping” that self-conscious
designing-as-drawing afforded [15, 1]. Jones and Alexander were
writing amidst the Design Methods Movement. This was the
moment when design researchers felt that the situations in and
for which designers were making futures were becoming much
more complex. The argument is related to the metahistorical one
Vilem Flusser was fond of: when things got too complex to speech,
we started writing; when things got too complex for writing,
we started designing-by-drawing [11]. Now that things are too
complex for diagrams and sketches, we—what?

The Design Methods Movement perhaps failed—it was at least
renounced by both Jones and Alexander—because, at its worst, it
conflated two different kinds of feasibility: technical and social.
The computation that was arriving at the time could process
complex issues related to manufacturability and functionality; but
it was wrong-headed to imagine that cultural/political complexities
could be resolved in the same way. This is why design researchers
in North America began to explore more dialogical ways of nego-
tiating “wicked problems” such as hermeneutic dialogue mapping
and the double-loop learning of reflective practice, at the same that
more participatory approaches to human-computer interaction
were being developed in Scandinavia [2, 6, 10, 23].

ENACTING WITH PROTOTYPES

What remained designerly about these social practices was their
materiality. Attaining consensus on a problem-frame is one thing,
but coming to an agreement about a promising solution-field is
another. To do this, designers shifted from 2D to 3D, or in truth to
4D: prototypes, enacted in scenarios. A physical prototype accesses
embodied aspects of interactions that can be missed when merely
imagining from visual representations. Whilst a prototype appears
to foreground the thing itself, its materialization in fact allows
consideration of the design will feel, how it is to interact with. The
object of prototyping is thing-being-used-by-someone.

In the recent history of professional design, especially in the
realm of digital products, there has been a slide, on the practicabil-
ity of side of the designing dialectic, from User-centered Design to
Human-centered Design, that is to say, from issues of Usability to
Experience. This is because what enacted prototyping reveals is not
just things about the product (whether it can be made to enable this
or that interaction), but also things about people (whether they can
be enabled to make this or that interaction). Improvising with phys-
ical prototypes (of varying levels of fidelity, with respect to both the
prototype and the scenario) accesses aspects of complex futural
social feasibility that the Design Methods Movement failed to
discern and that wicked problem negotiation could only talk about.

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