[-empyre-] march discussion - the prototype perspective

[adrian at cnmat.berkeley.edu]

> The prototype is an object critical of its own function. It is not
anthropomorphising.
> finished; it may not work. What characterizes a prototype is, first
what is it's work?
who decides what starting and finishing is?
> and foremost, the self-reflexivity of its operation: to use it is to
> put it to test and to engage in its evaluation. The most important
> effect of a prototype is, thus, the seemingly collateral reasoning
> about its failure, which is feedback into the process of prototyping.
it doesn't have a failure or a success. It is a component of a process.
The judgement of failure or success is part of the value system of
the stakeholders.
> Each prototype is just a dismissible iteration in this chain, a step
> to be overcome in order to produce the parameters of design of an even
> more ulterior product. Therefore, the prototype cannot be isolated
> from this engineering process – it always exists in-between versions,
> having no identity apart from this serial progression. The sincere
This descriptions is founded on a bias of progress, improvement and
serialism. My sketches of an analysis into hidden antiergonomy suggests
that the unfoldings of the experience prototypes are part of may
be interpreted and judged richly in many ways without being tied to
mechanistic process
view.
> objective of every prototype is nothing else than to self-differ, in
> the same way that the prototyping process aims to produce the
> fundamental différance of a standard, driving the fabrication of a
> million commoditized entities.
My prototypes are the opposite. They help me seek out what is the same
behind our
delusionary mental, material  and social constructs and help me understand
how healthy
worlds work that don't use commoditized objects.
>
> This specific sense is borrowed from the domain of industrial design.
> The parameters of mass production set by Fordism demand heavy
> machinery and precise techniques, resulting in a rigid topology of
> production. Contrary to traditional craftsmanship, the industrial
> process cannot be easily adapted or corrected; it must be implemented
> as a fully optimized architecture at once. Hence, within industrial
> paradigm, projecting and producing (and their respective pedagogies)
> become strictly separated activities, which no longer feedback
> immediately into each other - only through the process of prototyping.
> Being the production of the project, prototyping is the regulating gap
> between these two firmly localized territories. It structures not only
> the final object, but also with its negative: its mode of fabrication.
My prototypes teach people how to make their own prototypes. No
industrialization is
expected or assumed, denied or invited.
>
> Of course, the laboratorial isolation of prototyping loses its meaning
> once manufacturing topologies become more fluid. Then, not only the
> dynamics of design and production come closer to each other, but they
> also become mingled into the everyday use of the objects as well. One
> of the fields in which this can be more clearly perceived is software
> engineering, which demands the testing of prototypes by a large number
> of users. Following the “release early, release often” free software
> motto, beta versions are public released as soon as possible, so that
> they can be debugged in the wild. Systems such as the Flickr online
> photo directory and the Processing programming language spend years as
> unfinished products, and nevertheless garnished enormous popularity –
the unfinished status is just a slight of hand used to invite
rationalization from  the Charismatic Authority (Weber) of the
starchitects of early use of Java and media libraries towards
a network of contributors to an organized religion (Rational/Legal
authority) of Processing adherants.
> which might be precisely due to their open development. With the
> emergence of open, modular hardware, this paradigm is being brought
> also to physical object design. A new DIY culture is being promoted
> around the Arduino microcontroller and the practice of
> fast-prototyping.
Same process, replicated in Arduino using same reframing, magic inducing,
blessing tricks of Processing and the same trick used by Steve Jobs
blessing the iPhone and inviting
app developers into the closed system. Don't be misled by the word "open":
 the process in both cases is a construction of a panopticon where
developers run on their treadmills powering the prison. their creative
behaviours viewed and largely self-policed through the appstore or code
repository.
>
> In this new scenario, a prototype can be praised as the sufficient
> object, whose integrity is produced at the precise moment it is put
> into operation. Its whole engineering process is concluded by the user
> – sometimes, by its very use. This allows us not only to see the final
> object and its production as supplementary to the prototype and the
> prototyping chain, but also to engage with this fact in a positive
> way.
Are the faulty Toyotas prototypes? When will they be "finished"? How much
should we
be paid for prototyping for them?