Prototyping: How Ought We To Live? Prototypes, Propositions, and Design Fictions

proto from greek
original
primitive
prefix
to pos from greek
typology
objects in series
genre
gerund
social forms
active
dynamic

prototyping:
How Ought we to
Live? Prototypes,
Propositions, and
Design Fictions
Leticia Cartier Oxley
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree Master of
Arts in Design Studies
MA Program in Design Studies
Parsons School of Design
2017

Leticia Cartier Oxley
All Rights Reserved
©2017

Abstract
introduction
becoming
Methodology
foreground
alternative
scenario
conclusion
Bibliography
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35
47
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Section 01: The Magic of Prototypes: When Design (begins to) Become | 08 Section Sequencing
Section 02: What is a prototype? Why do we need the prototype? | 13 From Craft to Design: Where do prototypes come from?
Section 03: Prototyping as Knowledge Production/Prototype as Understanding
Section 04: Historical Cases of Prototyping: The Studio and Everyday as a Place of Research | 38 Charles and Ray Eames
Section 05: New Ways of Prototyping—Design Fictions | 51 Dunne and Raby: Prototyping New Relationships
Section 06: Elasticity and Social Dreaming—Prototyping Today for Tomorrow
Section 07: Philosophy of Design

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After two years, I can fairly say I had more fun during a Master’s
than anyone should.This thesis has been as great of an adventure
as any traveler’s tale.
I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Clive Dilnot. The
door to Clive’s office was always under ambush whenever I ran
into a trouble spot, had a question about my research or writing,
or just had a life-changing experience I needed to tell someone
about. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work,
but gave me maps to guide me in the right the direction when-
ever he thought I needed it. I would also like to thank Barbara
Adams. Her support gave me the confidence to push myself at
times when the thesis was hardest. You will always be one of my
mediators. I would also like to acknowledge Susan Yelavich for
her total encouragement throughout this thesis. You have given
my writing clarity and your support has made me feel at home in
Design Studies. Thank you for your boundless dedication to us.
Discussions with my Professors Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby,
and Otto Von Busch provided me with much needed guidance
acknowledgments

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abstract
Prototyping has always been an ally to the designer. The pur-
pose of prototyping is to operationalize research, suggesting a
clear material process from concept to completion. The creative
tension embodied by the prototype comes from its peculiar po-
sition in the design process. At the same time, it refines research
problems and questions through multiple iterations, but it also
translates abstract and incomplete ideas to material possibilities.
Prototypes, however embryonic, draw together the inchoate as
a rehearsal of what might emerge via the design process. They
are evolutionary precursors to final products, and, thus occupy
a double ontological status as materialized models of a poten-
tial real thing (“This!”), and as a proposition (“This?”). It is this
ambiguity and what this allows, that gives prototypes their ca-
pacity for communication and their faculty for research. From
anthropology to policy making, prototyping has been adopted as
a methodological approach and as a way to materialize solutions.
This capstone examines the operational and speculative roles of
prototyping through a series of case studies situating the proto-
over the course of this thesis. Your words and encouragement
were the impetus behind many of my adventures.
My deepest, most heartfelt, thanks go to my friend, Gene Duval.
If I could become only half the thinker, half the designer, and
half the friend that Gene is, it would certainly be one of my
greatest accomplishments.Thank you for all of your help and all
that you have taught me. I must express my very profound grat-
itude to my mom for providing me with unfailing support and
continuous encouragement throughout my years of study.With-
out your 7am and 2am phone calls, it is entirely possible I would
have never slept and, simultaneously, overslept this Master’s de-
gree. Thank you. Finally, I must thank all my friends and family.
Thank you all for being patient with me when I was at my most
emotional and for listening to all the ideas speeding through my
mind. The drinks and meals we shared over these past two years
mean everything to me.
In friendship…

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type both historically and showing the ways in which designers
are taking up prototyping as a form of speculative critical prac-
tice to rehearse and contemplate possible futures.
Keywords
Critical Design
Prototype
Problem-Setting
Design Fiction
Knowledge-Making
Design as Inquiry
Section 01:
Introduction
The Magic of
Prototypes:
When Design
(begins to)
Become

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Section
01:
Intro-
duction
Prototypes are paradoxes within design, existing materially but
acting almost invisibly.They are material presences, artifacts that
hold together questions and propositions, in the design process,
but they are quickly forgotten the moment the project is com-
pleted or another prototype takes its place. Thinking broadly, if
design is everywhere—from the tools we use to make things,
material goods, and technologies—it would seem that proto-
types should not lurk far behind. But in fact, we hardly see them.
Prototypes vanish into the ether almost immediately upon the
adoption of finished products, eliminating all traces of the labor
and the processes that brought them into existence. This is, in
fact, one of the hallmarks of great design. Well-designed prod-
ucts are adopted seamlessly and naturally into everyday use. The
ghosts of past prototypes continue to exist, and are embedded
only in our own familiarity with new products and devices that
we adopt into our everyday lives. In this sense, we have become
consumers and digesters of prototypes,otherwise progress would
come to a standstill. Are we not actually celebrating the creativ-
ity and the processes that went into design of the products we

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Section
01:
Intro-
duction
love and depend upon by NOT having to give any thought or
consideration to the creation of prototypes – only to their utility?
Therein lies the agency of the designer; therein resides the influ-
ence of her prototypes on our daily lives.
For designers, making prototypes, mock-ups, and sketches is
a daily preoccupation, a way of expressing, testing, and under-
standing. The first course of action when a brief is received is to
begin rapidly iterating potential solutions in order to understand,
both, the problem and how material interventions will work. For
non-designers, prototyping is beginning to inhabit the work-
space in the same way that “design thinking” has for the past
several years.Design thinking claims to bring the creative strate-
gies that designers have used to social issues, in which case rapid
prototyping and the sketching out of ideas is now commonplace
outside of the studio.What is being sought is a more creative and
productive space in which companies believe that materializa-
tion(s) can bring about the changes consumers desire—whether
that be sustainability or a simplification of complex data. This
capstone situates itself within the realm of Design Studies to
understand both the practical as well and the academic (human-
ities) approaches to the design processes. Explained by design
studies scholars Anne Chick and Paul Micklethwaite, “[d]esign
studies focuses on the contemporary design practice and culture,
and explores the ‘what?’and ‘why?’,as well as the ‘how?’of design
and designing.”1
This is a shift from looking at design history
and the effects of products after the fact, to incorporate history
as active in understanding and advocating for the present and
1
Anne Chick and Paul Micklethwaite, “Design as a Field,” in Design for Sus-
tainable Change: How Design and Designers Can Drive the Sustainability Agenda
(Lausanne, Switzerland: Ava Pub., 2011), 17.
the future through the development of “methods and principles
to guide research.”2
Essentially, applied research to hold design-
ers accountable to the larger systems in which their influence
acts. Due to this, design studies scholarship has placed emphasis
on how products advocate for themselves independent of their
creators or users and their criticism thinks with and through the
products themselves. Parts of the design process which are an-
cillary to designing, such as sourcing materials and the processes
that go into making the product are easy to overlook in criticism
in favor of their social effects. However, in the pipeline of prod-
uct design from concept to consumer, designers must conduct
research, both in terms of data and material possibilities in order
to get to the market. One of the most important yet peculiar
parts of design research is prototyping. Prototyping can be (and
has been) understood as a form of research. The physical proto-
type serves an evaluative purpose where the designer can see the
product in a nearly finished form, test functional aspects, and
expand upon what is observed directly from experience with the
product. However, the prototype exists in a multifarious space
where its presence is almost forgotten because it is not the final
incarnation of the product or, it remains unmaterialized because
prototypes often go unmade.Thus,this capstone seeks to find the
ways in which the physical prototype makes an argument and
establishes a sense of agency in the design process, particularly
in a period of digital modelling.This capstone aims at exploring
the prototype as praxis, suggesting that prototyping is a way of
pushing for more progressive products that will reclaim ethical
aspects which current design is often accused of being devoid of.

2
Victor Margolin, “Design History or Design Studies: Subject Matter and
Methods,” Design Issues 11, no. 1 (1995): 5.

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Section
01:
Intro-
duction
Thinking about prototyping, there are sustainable and ethi-
cal problems in which design is complicit.3
Often, design is cri-
tiqued for making too much stuff—an example of how proto-
typing negatively plays a role in this is the way visual modelling
is so advanced and accurate making it so designers can use these
models to gather profitable interest from investors to rapidly
produce products.4
Lost in this are the interactions, scenarios,
and visions of the long term effects of the product because the
visual models seem so perfect. Within this observation, Donald
Schön describes in The Reflective Practitioner, that there is per-
haps a tension between the “reflectivity” and the “reflexivity” of
the product; where the reflective signifies what is working within
the products’ immediate reach and reflexive points to the broad-
er social, cultural context—where power circulates.5
Strange-
ly, once these products reach the mass market the products are
implicitly iterative. Vastly changing and diverse consumer needs
invite critiques that should have been seen prior to production
and new possibilities emerge in the afterlife of the product. One
could speculate that by relying on computer modelling, design-
ers limit themselves by restricting the first-hand experience and
the subsequent inspirations that come from material prototyp-
ing. Computers can create a sense of perfection, however, going
3
Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
(Farnham: Ashgate, 1983) 54.
4
Examples of this are the many crowd-funding videos that present prototypes
in the background to create compelling narratives for future products. A neg-
ative example of this is Suisse, RD-shelter, 2016 (http://www.crowdfunder.
co.uk/rd-shelter) in which the prototypes of flat-pack shelters create a sense
social justice for refugees. The prototype appeals to minimalist and pragmatic
sensibilities and uses the mock-ups to establish credibility, but ignores social
and empirical research in which the shelter could be designing themselves into
a bigger political problem.
5
Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 54.
through the process of low-fidelity prototyping can lead to more
well-rounded innovations. The prototype acts as a launching
point from which new products may be extrapolated from an
existing template, wherefrom, the lack of interaction with prod-
ucts is inhibiting creativity. This indicates something special in
the interaction that people have with material products. Design
scholarship sometimes speaks of products having some sort of
“voice.”Short of implying that objects have any sort of sentience,
it is provocative to think of products as having power and poli-
tics over humans. Jane Bennett, who takes a radical approach by
claiming matter as living, suggests that understanding “matter”
(or,for our purposes,products) as “instrumentalized matter feeds
human hubris…it does so by preventing us from detecting…a
fuller range of the nonhuman powers, which can aid or destroy,
enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our
attentiveness, or even ‘respect.’”6
Bennett proposes that not look-
ing at material as living hinders human’s ability to live ethically
and sustainably, implying that understanding the non-human
world would provide us with greater possibilities for survival in
the Anthropocene. In a similar vein, it seems that prototypes are
imbued with a sort of vitality, albeit imaginary, in which they
are in conversation with the designer. Prototypes challenge, pro-
voke, and inspire possibilities.Thus, it is of interest to ask what is
happening when people make and fail to make. Is it merely the
externalizing and recognition of problems that makes it possible
for designers make other iterations or are there other tensions at
work in this process?
6
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), ix.

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Section
01:
Intro-
duction
Furthermore, it seems that prototypes embody a problem-
atic ethics where they are taking the best parts of the model-
ling process and showing the ideal form and aesthetics while
also dominating the cultures and genres that have come before
it.7
Embedded with the prototype are aspects or aspirations of
utopia. Where modelling can begin to indicate the typology of
things and begin to create a genre, the prototype inserts itself as
the controlling entity absorbing the perfected qualities of each
iteration prior. Thus, the prototype has a politics that plays out
within the design lab and presumably outside of it as well. As
such,this capstone traces aspects of the prototype to see how it is
moving from the studio context to a multidisciplinary space and,
eventually, the public realm.
Section Sequencing
Prototypes, in the context of this capstone, are understood as
a traditional industrial process and, more interestingly, growing
in their multidisciplinary uses through adoption of speculative
practices and theoretical rigor. While approaching this capstone
from the perspective of design studies,I also borrow from lessons
in industrial design, literature, and philosophy. Section 02, will
look at prototyping as one of the main methods of the designer
and how the prototype emerged as a form of research. This pa-
per focuses on the historical frameworks that have guided this
research through case studies. I situate the conversation in terms
of design as a separate activity from production through an anal-
ysis of Josiah Wedgewood. Historical examples of designers and
their processes to lay the foundation from which prototyping
7
Ulrich Lehmann, “Prototyping” (class lecture at Parsons The New School for
Design, New York, NY, September 2016).
is generally understood. Following this, Section 03 will struc-
ture how designers and academics look view the prototype by
analyzing texts that support the prototype as a method by both
theorist-practitioners directly engaged in prototyping as well as
theorists from anthropology and art. Just as design is expanding
its field, the theories that have guide the views of practice-based
researchers set the tone for looking at prototyping as creative
work. Prototypes are a first sketch of the design problem/solu-
tion and simultaneously are also research objects and provoca-
tive objects. As such, this capstone seeks to understand them as
products that can operationalize research through materializa-
tion and as discursive objects.
To further illustrate this point, designers Charles and Ray
Eames will demonstrate the creative process through traditional
forms of design (Section 04). This will inform my framework
for how designers approach creativity, imagination, and research.
However, much of this writing will focus on Speculative Critical
Design practices that value the prototype and use the tensions
that come with it as the footing for their products. Continuing
from speculative design, this paper speculates on what can a pro-
totype do (Section 05). Often, it is said that every product is a
proposition. Interestingly, speculative products work as research
objects, where there is no clear proposition being made on the
behalf of the designer or the product,creating interesting scenar-
ios that work to prototype interactions and new possibilities in
a more open ended fashion. Thus, investigating how design can
be used as a rehearsal for ethical and future scenarios in a more
extreme and immersive way. Classically, prototype “failures” are
understood as learning opportunities.Paired with the multidisci-
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will factor in to the production of future knowledge and forms
of understanding. Consequently, Section 06 looks at prototypes
as opportunities to test situations and futures. This paper con-
cludes with looking at the design of experiences and the ways
in which designers are hoping to insert themselves into political
conversations with their products and suggest alternate futures.
Thus, prototypes move from pragmatic objects to a social and
ethical imaginary, in which the possibilities and consequences of
products are tested. Considering that designers work “at scale,”
through the design of experiences, design evokes future realities,
a sense that is achieved through multidisciplinary approaches to
suspend disbelief, and tangibly understand how designs impact
social practices.
Section 02:
becoming
what is a
prototype?
Why do we need
the prototype?

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Section
02:
Becom-
ing
From Craft to Design:
Where do prototypes come from?
Design as we know it emerges from craft in which mass-produc-
tion split the work of problem-solving and making. The idiom-
atic distinction between design and craft is ideologically held on
the number of things produced and where they are made.8
A ru-
dimentary demarcation being that design is “high volume + fast
delivery =lower cost + repeat business”while craft is “low volume
+ slow delivery =mid-high cost + repeat business.”9
Upon a clos-
er inspection of the ethos of both craft and design, it seems that
materiality and prototyping are an underpinning of their rela-
tionship to each other.A brief exploration of craft can illuminate
8
It is also interesting to note the ways in which designers perceive the terms
and distinctions in their own field. While Product Design and Industrial De-
sign are often said to be interchangeable terms, they are still kept separate for
reasons in which designers claim the terms are more common based on loca-
tion (Europe and USA). More interestingly, some use the terms to point to in-
dustrial design as mass-produced products in the spirit of industrialization and
product design to go back to craft roots as a way of showing care and artistry.
9
Valentine, Prototype, 8.

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some of the thinking process and development of design, the
design process, and the reason behind these behaviors.

Prior to industrialization, the relationship between user and
maker was an intimate relationship in which products were ca-
tered to the user’s particular needs. This created many individ-
ualized products that were built upon a relationship between
craftsman and consumer. J. Christopher Jones explains that craft
products were not “scientific”or “empirical”in terms of process.10
Rather their products, were the piecing together of many experi-
ences and a difficult to explain haptic body of knowledge.11
Jones’
analysis points to how craft’s evolution fed into our sense of de-
sign as we know it, in which, artisans could translate practical
needs into sketches, which then became purchasable products. 12
To that end,Jones discerns that craftsmen’s process was a succes-
sion of successes and failures with no clear way of understanding
the result other than—“it works.” Consequently, the only way
to understand most craft products would be to reverse engineer
them. That is not to say that each product was so drastically
different from the other that there were no similarities among
them, but products combining tactile memory (honed through
apprenticeships and years of experience) to recreate shapes and
forms with an ability to adapt to new demands brought along
through time and consumer needs.The latter suggesting a natu-
ral flow for products evolution.
10
J. Christopher Jones, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (New York:
Wiley, 1980), 19.
11
Jones’s analysis on craft comes from reading George Sturt’s “The Wheel-
wright’s Shop,” which is a deeply personal and poetic view of craft.
12
Jones, Design Methods, 19.
However, one of the weaknesses of craft is notably, the speed
with which change occurs. Gradual changes of a singular aspect
are not responsive to needs “when what seems to be called for
is a complete reorganization of the form as a whole.”13
With the
heralding of the industrial age and mass-production, the design-
er emerged as an intermediary between consumer and maker.
The designer could understand the needs of the user and create
tools that could accomplish the task for a multitude of people—
eliminating the reliance on individualized products in favor of a
singular product with multiple uses. From this, products could
be produced in large numbers, whereby the craftsman became
a specialized worker in terms of skills needed for assembly. As
described by Adrian Forty in his book Objects of Desire:
…it is a peculiarity of capitalism that each beneficial innova-
tion also brings a sequence of other changes, not all of which
are desired by all people so that, in the name of progress, we
are compelled to accept a great many distantly related and
possibly unwanted changes. The steam engine, for example,
brought greater efficiency to manufacturing and greater speed
to transport, but the making of it helped turn master crafts-
men into wage labourers and caused towns to grow in size and
unhealthiness. The idea of progress, though, includes all the
changes, desirable as well as undesirable.14
Thus, the work of the designer was no longer the whole process
from conceptualization to materialization, it was to ideate, un-
derstand, and be able to communicate all the pieces and process-
es necessary to produce. Forty characterizes the shift in labor as
a sad receding of talent, condensed to what we understand today
as management. But this shift in how labor was distributed also
13
14
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgewood to IBM
(London: Pantheon, 1987), 11.

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signals the way that design has a strange capacity to make things
invisible and appear seamless. Just as the person who makes the
product can no longer be seen, the mechanical processes that
go into making a product and the messy circuitry underneath
cannot be seen by the consumer.The movement away from craft
to mass-production, in essence, made the labor of the designer
that of prototyping.
Forty exemplifies the split from craftsman to designer in his
analysis of Josiah Wedgewood. He states that “[i]n the history of
every industry,design has become necessary as a separate activity
in production once a single craftsman ceases to be responsible
for every stage of manufacture from conception to sale”in which
Wedgewood, a pottery master, was particularly attuned to the
distinction between the design and the manufacture of pots. 15
Working in the time period where workers were becoming less
specialized, Wedgewood would distribute his designs to his em-
ployees to reproduce them accurately. His work, was to simplify
work and eliminate variation—in which he discovered materials
and repeat patterns that could be done by multiple hands to ex-
actitude. However, this was a process of trial and error in which
he had to find the right balance of workmanship and individual-
ity.The control that the craftsmen had over the final result would
often differentiate from the designs that Wedgewood would im-
part as they would make alteration in “want of ideas”—a sense
of personal expression.16
To combat this, Wedgewood further
divided the labor into smaller stages and increased supervision
over the quality—finding that less skilled labor could accomplish
these tasks with more reliability.
15
Forty, Objects of Desire, 29.
16
Forty, Objects of Desire, 33.
However, returning to the point that the in which the work
of prototyping was given to the designer, the work of designing
became its own distinct phase.17
Wedgewood realized that the
separation of labor required detailed instructions from which the
workmen could work from. Professional prototypers, or model-
ers, became essential employees who would create designs that
achieved the standard of uniformity and consumer desirabili-
ty that Wedgewood demanded. Artists that could understand
consumer taste and add academic credibility made the products
marketable. The sense that artists had for fashion carried into
distinguishing features from craft pieces, in which craftsmen
could not keep up with current tastes or fads.Thus, Wedgewood
found a way to balance the materials, both in manufacturing
possibilities and cost, with the ability to mass-produce them in a
uniform way discovered through periods spent enduring a series
trials-and errors. As such, design-by-drawing became the differ-
ence between the haptic knowledge of craft and machine-made
things.18
Aside from the possibility of splitting work amongst
many for the sake of uniformity and cheap labor, the advantage
of design in this way allowed for one person to step back and
understand the product as whole.Because the drawing needed to
be incredibly specific for basic engineered feasibility, designs on
paper allowed one person to undergo projects that used to be far
too large for a single person to complete. Moreover, this made it
possible to prototype and fail with less risk—allowing for inno-
vation to occur more rapidly. Jones states:
The effect to of design concentrating the geometric aspects
of manufacture in a drawing is to give the designer a much
17
Forty, Objects of Desire, 33-34.
18
Jones, Design Methods, 20-24.

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greater ‘perceptual span’ than the craftsman had.The designer
can see and manipulate the design as a whole and is not pre-
vented, either by partial knowledge or by the high cost of al-
tering the product itself, from making fairly drastic changes in
design. Using his ruler and compasses he can rapidly plot the
trajectories of moving parts and can predict the repercussions
that change the shape of one part will have upon the design
as a whole.This may well be the reason why designers. almost
alone among the specialists of modern industry, are ‘wholeists’
rather than ‘atomists’ defending their creations as single enti-
ties that must be accepted without modification or else must
be reconsidered from scratch. A designer knows only too well
the frustrating cycles of modification and remodification
which have to be worked through before the delicate balance
of his final design is achieved.19
What Wedgewood accomplished as one of the first industrial de-
signers was a radical way of approaching production successfully.
In taking the best elements of craft and noticing how to increase
productivity, the consistency and tastefulness of his products
led him to marketable success. As kin of this design tradition,
focusing on prototyping, we can appreciate the brilliance with
which Wedgewood envisioned the whole production process.
Michael Schage, writing about craft in terms of interaction asks,
“What elements of craft promote conceptual enhancement and
technical refinement? Three organizing design principles merit
special focus: (a) a prototype is a hypothesis, (b) a prototype is a
marketplace and (c) a prototype is a playground.”20
Wedgewood
exemplifies the ideas that design understands its position in the
marketplace and forms itself according to taste and profitability.
However, what Wedgewood does not capture about our sense of
19
20
Michael Schrage, “Crafting Interactions: The Purpose and Practice of Seri-
ous Play,”in Prototype: Design and Craft in the 21st Century, ed. Louise Valentine
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 21.
design and process as we know it today is how designers incor-
porate play.
Though Wedgewood obsessively experimented with ideas and
materials, there is a difficult to place gravitas that playful de-
signers have in the cultural imaginary. Paired with great designs,
their process reveals something about how design influences how
we live. Design is an essential human activity—to reason, orga-
nize, imagine, and reshape the world through the production of
things as a way of making the world fit for humans to live in.21
It can also be seen as a profession and in the service of “cultural
production” or, on the contrary, seen as a critical practice against
consumerism and to provoke—exemplified through Danish In-
teraction Designer Preben Morgensen’s notion of “provotypes”
(products meant to disrupt everyday life practices by creating
experiences that estrange users from familiar circumstances).22
Lastly, design can be seen as “inquiry,” where the goal is not to
research or provide data but to provide humanistic perspectives
on issues.23
Considering all of the categories in which design
can be placed, the term itself leads to confusion. John Heskett,
captures the multiple significations of the word “design” in a
sentence saying, “Design is to design a design to produce a de-
sign.”24
Here, design assumes the meanings of object and activ-
21
Björn Franke, “Design as Inquiry: Prospects for a Material Philosophy,”
(PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, 2016), 28.; Elaine Scarry,The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 2006), 278.
22
Franke,“Design as Inquiry,”28.; Preben Mogensen,“Towards a Provotyping
Approach in Systems Development,” Scandinavian Journal of Information Sys-
tems, Vol. 4, 1992: 31-53.
23
Franke, “Design as Inquiry.”
24
Heskett, John.Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 5.

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ity.25
As a modifier, design morphs and complements the terms
it is describing such as “industrial design”or “interior design.”In
the studio, design can mean to “formulate” “draft,” “structure,”
“conceive,” represent,” “plan,” the appearance, etc.26
Whereas in
everyday contexts, design is used as term to add cultural capital
to things and experiences such as “designer jeans” and “designed
chairs.”27
Bjorn Franke states that:
…design has increasingly become an imperative: one has to
design one’s home, holiday, business or life, whereby the term
“designing” seems to replace terms like “making” and “doing”
(Gerritzen and Kovink, 2006). This development may be
caused by the vagueness of the term that describes a range
of both activities and objects, and that is not tied to a single
discipline or profession. It may furthermore be the result of
the attempt to “democratise” design and to empower people
by giving them the ability to shape their environment without
the need to consult professional designers and without being
at the mercy of the limited range of products mass-produced
by large companies. It may, however, also be the outcome of
a shift towards an economy that places creativity, innovation
and design at its centre.28
Design has always been rooted in solving practical problems and
discussion surrounding design has always come from a prob-
lem-solving perspective. As society pushes towards being pro-
ductive and data-driven, the adoption of these terms seems nat-
ural. Yet, design studies, looking at this phenomenon, sees how
this can lead people into designing themselves into new prob-
lems. Designers have habitually seen themselves as producers of
goods for consumption as opposed to producers of knowledge.
25
Franke, “Design as Inquiry,” 28.
26
27
28
Every design works as a proposition, suggesting a particular
way of living and expressing a worldview though their medi-
ating of cultural and theoretical aspects in product form. De-
sign is uniquely equipped to intervene in problems through its
self-conscious knowledge of how products emerge from cultur-
al, uncanny, and temporal logics. Design is often assumed to be
a product of the designer’s consciousness; however, prototypes
exemplify how the designer’s sensibilities are informed by the
external context and technologies. Thus, there is a complex in-
tertwining of how we make things in order to understand things,
and also, how these things reflect back and also make us.

Section 03:
methodology
prototyping as
knowledge production/
prototype as
understanding

25
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Section
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Method-
ology
Prototypes are the designer’s unsurpassed critic. They lay every
flaw and strength to bear in the most pragmatic sense possible.29
Although criticism holds a harsh connotation, the prototype has
a unique “appreciation” for the product being built.30
It holds
well-informed judgment over the systems at work, both mate-
rially and systemically. According to Louise Valentine suggests
that the prototype is a “friend” there is a productive tension at
play, where the prototype can elucidate what is working, to sup-
port the designer, and critique where standards are not met.31
Valentine characterizes the whimsical nature of this point in the
process stating:
Prototyping is a key means with which an individual’s imag-
ination is tenaciously explored, tested, broken, and rebuilt—
pushed and pulled into some kind of order, if only for a
fleeting moment. It is a conscious escape from reality, and at
29
Louise Valentine, Prototype: Design and Craft in the 21st Century (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 9.
30
Raymond Williams, Keyword: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Burwood:
Royal Blind Society of New South Wales, 1982), 85.
31

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its best, it is an uncontrolled extravaganza of the mind with
scant regard for conventional wisdom. That is not to say the
process is mindless, simply that in cannot and should not
be bound by certainty. The prototype is the friend we turn
to when we are unsure, the compass when we are lost and
the ally who comes to our aid when we are in trouble.32
In practice, the prototype has been treated as a first course of
action for the designer to begin to give form to a future product.
The prototype serves as a useful thinking tool for designers. As
such, two domains, research and design, which have traditional-
ly been seen as opposites are, in fact, very similar in that “both
are actively engaged in a process that proceeds from a question,
problem, opportunity or a status quo, and are directed at cre-
ating something that does not yet exist (either knowledge or
product) and that fits into the future.”33
The inherent purpose
of prototyping is to operationalize research in a way that allows
the designer to create a meaningful proposition to a situation—
whether that be to explore and define the problem or the de-
velopment of a product towards a final solution. Yet, it must be
noted that the prototype’s endurance through the various facets
of design shows their efficacy in moving from abstract ideas to
material—the latter suggesting a more visceral and human cen-
tric form of understanding. Design has a facility for synthesiz-
ing complex ideas though material means in a nuanced fashion
that theory and philosophy struggle to break through. As a re-
sult, “thinking by doing” is being adopted by other fields as an
approach because the creative presence of prototyped concepts
often incites more dynamic discussions. Their presence inspires,
32
33
Pieter Jan Stappers, “Prototypes as a Central Vein for Knowledge Develop-
ment,” in Prototype: Design and Craft in the 21st Century, ed. Louise Valentine
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 85.
insofar as they become part of the environment in which people
interact and are able to consolidate their thinking into products
that unify technology, research, theory, and practice.34
However,
there has been very little written about prototyping’s application
to research specifically. Considering that the development pro-
cess is richest at the point where propositions and possibilities
become semi-real, this section looks at strategies for prototyp-
ing and how they function in the creative process. The follow-
ing literature positions scholarly thinking about prototypes in
a phenomenological context, shows how they are a functional
thinking tool, and a process for developing a research question.35
Design, as an ability, is a practice based on things and situa-
tions. Designers make things to understand and grasp the sur-
rounding environment—in which design, in addition to mak-
ing products, is also designing mediations. As such, design and
the study of design is experiencing a sort of resurgence because
it is important that we understand the “interior structure” of
things.36
“Design thinking” has become a buzzword in business
and academic contexts as a method that opens discourse and
disrupts the standard working order with promises of efficiency
and results—the criteria of such dependent upon each project.
Valentine suggests looking into prototyping by using “mindful
inquiry” as a methodological framework for exploring designers’
practices in both historical and contemporary contexts. Accord-
ing to Valentine, this methodology combines phenomenology,
hermeneutics, critical social theory, and Buddhism because the
“designer’s craft is an interrelated system of activities informed
34
Stappers, “Prototypes as a Central Vein for Knowledge Development,” 85.
35
36
Scarry, The Body in Pain, 278.

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by the everyday and the unusual: a continuous, organic process
with embedded layers of meaning and experience.”37
By plac-
ing emphasis on self-awareness and attention to changing and
perpetual activities in looking at both the subject and research
context we get a clearer picture of the process as a whole—crit-
ical, compassionate, painful and playful. Although “mindful in-
quiry” is not explicitly invoked by any of the other writers who
contribute to the book, it is a useful term because it captures the
way in in which thinking through prototyping is encapsulated in
the larger scheme of thinking in the everyday.38
Michel De Cer-
teau argues that people are not merely passive consumers, but
active manipulators of their environment—absorbing, adjust-
ing, repurposing, and redesigning. Prototyping through this lens
joins research with social activity and underlines particularities
designers’exhibit when researching, such as photo collecting and
field notes. The “interrelation” of quotidian activities combined
with the deliberateness of the studio creates a process rooted
in various layers of meaning and experience.39
Prototypes, then,
manifest empirical and experiential research and the testing of
their properties serves to “communicate, educate, and inform.”40
Accordingly, Herbert Simon suggests that artifacts are an
“interface,” a “meeting point” between the inner and outer en-
vironment.41
Considering prototypes, Simon’s suggestion that
this juxtaposition of internal properties that constitute the arti-
37
38
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008).
39
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1992), 32.
40
Jim Rudd, Ken Stern, and Scott Isensee,“Low vs High-Fidelity Prototyping
Debate,” Interactions 3/1 (1996): 78.
41
Herbert Alexander Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge: MIT,
Fig. 01. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. “Technological Dreams Series: No 1, Robots.” In Design
and the Elastic Mind, edited by Paola Antonelli. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008.

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fact in itself,and,external surroundings that can determine if the
product will serve its proposed purpose, helps to understand the
knowledge-producing qualities of the prototype. This is seen in
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s project Technological Dreams
Series [figure 01] where a series of robots, each with distinct fea-
tures, challenge the way we think about robots. Because some of
the robot’s are independent and other’s are needy,it opens up de-
bate to consider if they will take care of us,or will we be the one’s
taking care of them?42
Consequently, the making of prototypes
would suggest that their use-value emerges in their ability to
clarify ideas.They are instrumental to “problem-setting”and only
make sense when they are interrogating problems.43
Heidegger,
states that “[t]he kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we
have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather the kind
of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and
this has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’”44
Knowledge is apprehend-
ed through involvement in the world, where the mind locates
itself within the subjects it is grasping.45
While the subject being
apprehended is considered other, there is a communing with the
subject—an ongoing sense of becoming—in which knowledge
can only be found through a dual dealing with the object both
perceptive and haptic. Knowing, as opposed to knowledge, is
thus “embodied,”osmotic (in that the use of these instruments is
1996), 6.
42
Anthony Dunne, and Fiona Raby,“Technological Dreams Series: No 1, Ro-
bots,” in Design and the Elastic Mind. By Paola Antonelli (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2008), 28.
43
Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 18.
44
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 95.
45
Tihamér Margitay, Knowing and Being: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Mi-
chael Polanyi (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
incorporated into the sensory experience), situated and bound to
the context in which this knowledge is being performed.46
Prototypes are vessels for knowledge. There are different
ideological possibilities for prototypes because there is an over-
arching lack of understanding of what they are and what they
are doing. Prototyping and modelling exist as thinking tools in
which designers claim to use them to demonstrate their ideas
outright—in which, designers often like to make subtle distinc-
tions between types of prototypes (modelling, sketching, mock-
up). However, it is clearer to characterize these objects as part of
the process that defines and elucidates the idea for the designer.47
Design duo El Ultimo Grito, suggest that the designer’s idea is
a “mirage” that seems perfect in their mind, but once the idea
begins to materialize the imperfections reveal themselves and
incite a creative struggle, where the truths of the situation re-
main and the false assumptions must be resolved.48
The model
begins to reflect errors and discontinuities in thought once the
idea begins to materialize. Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that:
It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of
reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total
situation, which involves reference from the one to the other.
What is given is not a massive and opaque world,or a universe
46
Cameron Tonkinwise and Jaqueline Lorber-Kasunic, “What Things Know:
Exhibiting Anismism as Artefact-Based Design Research,” working Papers in
Art and Design, Volume 4 (2006): 3.
47
Prototyping and modelling may be considered stages in and of themselves
as well as a total stage under the label of prototyping. I go into this in the
following section (defining the terms), showing the slippage between terms
and arguments as to why it is both important and unimportant to see them as
distinct phases in the design process.
48
El Ultimo Grito, “Models and Prototypes,” in Prototyping, 1 (Work-In-
Progress).

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of adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over
the density of the world in order to clarify it, but which, com-
ing second, reflects back to it only its own light. 49
The relationality that materialization and the subsequent reflec-
tion upon the model or prototype intertwines what was once
limited to abstraction or only in the designers’ mind into the
public sphere. The act of model-making works as a translation
from abstract ideas to material, thus the model begins to grasp at
the “objectness” and the “aesthetic characteristics” of the (poten-
tial) product-to-be.50
On the other hand, the prototype tests the
functionality and asks how does the product behaves. Both work
in conversation with each other to create the most responsive
product. However, the prototype dominates the model because
a design may want to have a particular aesthetic. Nevertheless, if
doing so inhibits the “delivery of function” all of the actors need
to negotiate an alternative or compromise. Additionally, the pro-
totype dominates the design, in a dialectical movement between
the form that the designer wants to impose and the functional
possibilities. This dialectical movement between situation, de-
signer,and prototype is not simply a way of showing “unity”with
one’s surroundings to be able to produce new products, but an
aggrandizement of reason through phenomenological engage-
ment.
Amplifying this engagement, modelling and prototyping
work as a methodology as they give shape and render pre-re-
flective experience as intelligible—adding to their philosophic
49
Maurice Mearleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Lingis (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 35.
50
El Ultimo Grito. “Models and Prototypes,” 1.
value. They can work in the pre-ideation process which aims at
exploring their contexts and eventually transforming these very
same contexts—thus, the exploration develops into the design
brief. Prototypes and models become “allusive objects” in a se-
ries of projects that explore methods and the process of aesthetic
definition. Models then carry the knowledge we have and offer
a way of imagining and speculating into the things we do not
(yet) know.Building from the notion of prototypes as speculative
products (not merely for speculative design, but for all design),
prototypes can be understood as hybrid objects. Because the it-
erations engage in a qualitative exchange, there is much to be
said for what is gained (insight) and lost (failed ideas) in the de-
velopment of this hybrid. As such these hybrid constructs allow
the designer to understand “the event”—the object and context
as inseparable from each other.Thus, in introducing the element
of time and combining it with their defamiliarized typologies
demands that the designer project themselves into an unknown
future in which they can unleash their creativity because they are
no longer tied to precursor objects. Thus, in thinking freely the
designer is able to create objects that could radically intervene in
design problems.

Section 04:
foreground
historical cases
of prototyping:
the studio and
everyday as a
place of research

37
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Section
04:
Fore-
ground
What are we looking at when we say “prototyping?” In short,
prototyping can be seen as a combination of creativity, imagina-
tion, and deliberate push towards reality—a sort of translation
through material iteration. However, many designers have pro-
cesses that draw attention them.Their admirability is something
more that the products they make, but how they carry them-
selves and manage their studio. Nigel Cross states that “[l]it-
erature on creativity often emphasizes the “flash of insight” by
which a creative idea is frequently reported to occur. The classic
accounts of creative breakthroughs suggest creative thought is
characterized by such acts of sudden illumination.”51
While the
narratives are often told in this manner in which the designers
mind is an impenetrable treasure chest of creativity, the process
is,in fact,assessable.What is interesting is that the “creative leap”
as he describes it is more “a sudden change in position or per-
spective than what was previously understood.”52
The material
51
Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (London: Springer London, 2010),
43.
52
Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing.

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learning from prototyping that takes place has a nearly antag-
onistic presence, pressing the designer to prevail over material
setbacks, such as failed features, and ideological stagnation to
produce the best solution to the problem—not merely satisfy a
minimum set of needs. Focusing on understanding design as a
marketplace, hypothesis, and playground, shows how designers
think, respectively about who they are designing for, the future
and possibilities of such design, and the way in which process
and experimentation lead to innovation. Where prototypes
themselves hold together ideas, the act of prototyping in much
broader including research and “designerly playfulness.”The case
studies that follow show how designers bring with them the to-
tal of their human experience into their designs. Design is a way
of understanding the world and making propositions about what
it is to live a good life (in the philosophic sense). Prototyping,
in slight contrast, is the tumultuous experience of making an
argument for compassion, in order to address the most urgent of
human needs.
Charles and Ray Eames: WWI Splints
The quintessential example of design is usually a chair. Chairs,
much to the of the chagrin of design students, highlight the
propositional nature of design,showing in their variety the num-
ber of solutions possible for a problem and their development as
a response to taste and cost. In many ways, they can be seen as
a perpetual prototyping in design, in which each iteration is an
experiment to suggest improvements for the next version. How-
ever,in the larger scheme of things,it seems that designers revisit
staples of design as a way of developing a process; by which,
Charles and Ray Eames developed a materially driven approach
as opposed to working their way backwards from sketches of
end-products. The Eames’ line of furniture, started with a failed
attempt at designing a chair without knowledge of what the ma-
terials could do—as a result of such a failure, the Eames’ devel-
oped a method of constant prototyping and experimentation to
inform the look of their designs.
Fig. 02. Eames, Charles and Eero Saarinen. Low-Back Armchair (Entry Panel for MoMA Compe-
tition for Organic Design in Home Furnishings). 1940. Pencil on Board, 30 x 20”. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. From: MoMA, http://www.moma.org (accessed May 04 2017).

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The concept of the Eames chair, an example of design so
strong it can be seen as a genre in and of itself, began as a de-
sign failure. In a partnership with Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames
began to experiment with molded plywood [figure 02] during
the late 1930’s.53
They set out to make an inexpensive, mass-pro-
duced chair molded to the body that would eliminate the use
of upholstery, thus, giving it a modern vocabulary. At the time,
plywood was a new, yet disparaged material which Eames and
Saarinen had hoped could be molded in two directions at once
to make a shell fitted to the body.54
The project was submitted to
a furniture making contest sponsored by MoMA in which two
unknown designers won the competition. However, Saarinen
and Eames failed at making the chair without upholstery. The
back of the chair, where the curvature becomes the seat, would
splinter and become uncomfortable for the user—forcing them
to upholster the seat to cover the flaw. Thus, the chair was not
able to be manufactured as Eames and Saarinen declared it could
be.The major lesson in this was to never make the mistake of de-
signing without the materials first at the forefront.This became a
describing feature in Eames designing,where “the final form was
not willfully predetermined,but grew out of recognizing,accept-
ing, and rigorously working through all the constraints of the
particular design problem under consideration.”55
They learned
that design is a push and pull between imagined solutions and
actual possibilities.
53
Jason Weems, “War Furniture: Charles and Ray Eames Design for the
Wounded Body,” Boom: A Journal of California, vol. 2, no. 1 (2012): 46.
54
Galen Cranz, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2000).
55
Max Underwood, “Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” in Ptah
(Helsinki: Aalto Foundation, 2006), 49.
In an TV interview, with Charles and Ray Eames the inter-
viewer asks “where did the classic Eames chair come from? Did
it come to you in a flash as you were shaving one morning?”56
To
which Charles responds cheerfully, “it sort of came to me in a
30-year flash if you want.”57
From the interviewer,we see the de-
sire to delve into the designer’s mind and understand a seeming
superpower to problem-solve in an arresting fashion. However,
that thirty year flash of insight is the result of much experimen-
tation, respect for design constraints, and a deep curiosity mixed
with a willingness to change perspectives.58
The Eames’ were
known for their playful spirit and constant experimentation. It
was not uncommon to see them pour all of their energy and
spare money, even in times that they were financially burdened,
into making prototypes.
56
Eames: The Architect and the Painter, prod. Bill Jersey and Jason Cohn (New
York: First Run Features, 2011), DVD.
57
Eames, 2011, DVD.
58
Underwood, “Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” 49.
Fig. 03. WW2 US Medical Research Centre. Color photograph. Open view showing the contents of
97815 / 9781500 – Splint Set. Available from: med-dept.com, (accessed May 04, 2017).

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However,oneoftheirmostimpactfulprojectswastheirmolded
plywood splints for wounded soldiers in WWII [figure 04].Jason
Weems, looking at War Furniture, states that “[t]reated too of-
ten as a footnote in the narrative of their contribu-
tion to modern design, the splint in fact played a sem-
inal role in shaping the Eameses’ design philosophy.”59
During the war, the military had issued metal splints for medics
to stabilize wounds [figure 03].The materials reverberated along
the injury exacerbating the damage.60
Noticing the problem, in
1942, the Navy commissioned the Eames’ to develop a light-
weight splint,durable,yet easily maneuverable for transportation
in tight ship quarters.61
Although Charles had already experi-
mented with molded plywood before and failed, this new prob-
lem forced the designers to think about design within a new
dimension.Taking what they already knew about forming furni-
ture to the body, this new project tasked them with making their
designs empathetic.
The Eames’ talent for perceiving the problem and finding the
right language with which to interject themselves into the situ-
ation made all the difference in the design process of the splints.
The Eames splint became a model of new ways of conceiv-
ing orthopedic devices, not only because of its innovation in
materials and artistry, but also for the way that its anthro-
pomorphixed contours made it feel and look like an organic
extension of the limb to which it attached. Just as the phys-
ical act of pulling traction returned the disfigured limb to
normal form, the splint’s visual and tactile naturalism. Un-
like other splints that made little effort to defelct the artifi-
59
Weems, “War Furniture,” 46
60
Eames, 2011, DVD.
61
Weems, “War Furniture,” 46.
ciality of their materials and structure, and thereby madiate
the divide between natural body and industrial prosthetic,
the Eames design pursued the possibility of a more organ-
ic and empathetic interconnection of subject and armature.62
62
Weems, “War Furniture,” 47.
Fig. 04. Charles Eames (American, 1907-1978). Leg Splint, designed 1941-1942; manufactured
1943-1945.Plywood,42 x 4 1/4 x 8 in.(106.7 x 10.8 x 20.3 cm).Brooklyn Museum,Anonymous gift,
Wikimedia Commons 83.156.

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The splints affirmed humanity at a vulnerable moment.In reject-
ing the artificiality, the Eames’ showed through design that they
were also healers and responsive to struggles of the everyday.De-
sign was, therefore, an intervention that made the external world
recognize humanity and individuality. The splint was no longer
an object to transport the soldier, but a transformation object
which acknowledged the traumatic event they just experienced
with care.The soldier, too, could show reciprocity with the splint
as an extension of their own body, because the person was the
central focus of the object.63
Rather than trying to work their way backwards from a de-
sign, Charles and Ray carried on from the lesson learned with
the low-back armchair—to extrapolate from experimentation.
Having already had experience molding plywood, they created
a bowl shape set to Charles’ leg. Because the wood could not be
molded to a perfectly solid bowl, they cut out slots that kept the
integrity of the leg. However, this worked well for the intended
use, because bandages could easily run through the gaps and at-
tach to the leg. The splints were successful in reducing cases of
gangrene and poor circulation and provided sufficient income
for the Eames’ to continue their design work.
Following the war, the Eames’ set up their own design studio
to produce a collection of plywood furniture.The splints became
the prototypes for the chairs. Shown in an excerpt form a 1952
Herman-Miller dealer packet [figure 05], the chair picked up
what was functional from the splints and brought that knowl-
edge into the home and office space. Inexpensive, durable, ergo-
63
Fig. 05. Ronan, Alex. 2015, An annotated page from a 1952 dealer packet. Dwell Magazine, available
from: Dwell Life, http://www.dwell.com (accessed May 05, 2017).

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nomic, and easy to move, the Lounge Chair Wood (or “LCW”)
kept remnants of medical design without the sterile feeling of
function over form.
The endurance of Eames’ design would be steadfast based
upon their products alone. However, their collaborative practice
pioneered a new type of studio research. Kazys Varnelis quotes
Paul Schrader in calling the Eames’way of communicating ideas
“information-overload.”64
The set up of the studio was filled with
models, images, materials, sources of inspiration to stimulate the
designers to more innovative designs. The Eames’ had a unique
grasp of play and discipline in their practice, in which the pop-
ularity conveys the joy that went into making their products. In
1953, the Eames’ began to make films to convey their research,
in which Charles Eames suggests that “[t]hey are not really films
at all, just ways to get across an idea.”65
Film, which they viewed
as another extension of designing, was medium for which de-
sign and architectural ideas would not “degenerate”was a shift in
thinking about design as a form of research and theoretical prac-
tice.Their aim was to make a clear statement as to how we could
“re-imagine the world anew.”66
They did not seek to produce
products for the sake of making new things or reconfigure data
through new mediums, but in fact to contribute to knowledge
and redirect its trajectory and create new avenues for design.
64
Kazys Varnelis,“Is There Research in the Studio?,” Varnelis.net,15 May 2007,
http://varnelis.net/articles/ there_research_studio.; Paul Schrader, “Poetry of
Ideas: The Films of Charles Eames,” Film Quarterly 23 (1970): 10.
65
Varnelis, “Is There Research in the Studio?”
66
Varnelis, “Is There Research in the Studio?”
Section 05:
alternative
new ways of
prototyping:
design fictions

49
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Section
05:
Alterna-
tive
Design is always thinking about the future. Prototypes inhabit a
fictional space always projecting out to what could be and bring
that experience into the present. Victor Margolin proposes that
“[a]s creators of models, prototypes, and propositions, design-
ers occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the
world that could be. Informed by the past and the present, their
activity is oriented towards the future.”67
Prototypes most often
conceptualize objects for the near-future, thinking about their
users needs and producing things that are useful for them. How-
ever,there are also products that think about the future different-
ly and capture our imagination to see how the future transforms
the way we live. A common example being cars. Looking at city
structure, it is strange to note that we forget how much the car
changed the way we build. However, cars have held the cultur-
al imaginary since their conception. At the New York World’s
Fair in 1939, General Motors presented Futurama, designed by
Norman Bel Geddes. Inside, was a landscape built around the
67
Margolin, Victor, “Design, the Future and the Human Spirit,” Design Issues
23, no. 3 (2007): 4.

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premise of the automobile. The audience was carried through
the exhibition by a conveyor belt [figure 06] and presented with
a city filled with intersections ready for high-volume traffic and
vast multilane highways. Geddes, in his design, made the visitors
into simple consumers as opposed to contributors of what was
yet to come.68
The only semblance of participation was demon-
strated in a badge reading: “I have Seen the Future” [figure 07].
The exhibition presented an automotive utopia and left out a
presentation of alternative futures in General Motors best in-
terest. Where this was seen as speculative in 1939, the 1960’s
rendered this proposition as fact. “The world of tomorrow,” the
theme for the World’s Fair, was characterized by General Mo-
tors as technological progress—a narrow view of design’s contri-
bution to futuring.
Dunne and Raby:
Prototyping New Relationships
The propositions of Futurama have become today’s nightmares.
“The future,” beyond General Motors proposal, is immensely
complicated, and what was once seen as visionary has designed
us into an onslaught of problems—often referred to as wicked
problems.69
Wicked problems, a phrase coined by Horst Rittel,
defines them as a “class of social system problems which are
ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there
are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values,
and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly
68
69 Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Studies
A Reader, ed. Hazel Clark and David Brody (New York: Bloomsbury Academ-
ic, 2009), 96-100.
Fig. 06: Norman Bel Geddes, Futurama, Spectators, General Motors Pavilion, New York World’s
Fair, 1939. Source: Donald Albrecht, ed., Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (New York: Abrams,
2012), 345. Copyright held by: General Motors LLC; GM Media Archives.
Fig. 07: Norman Bel Geddes, Futurama, “I Have Seen the Future,” Pin, General Motors Pavilion,
New York World’s Fair, 1939. Source: Donald Albrecht, ed., Norman Bel Geddes Designs America
(New York: Abrams, 2012), 298. Copyright held by: General Motors LLC, GM Media Archives.

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confusing.”70
Richard Buchanan suggests that this underlines a
tension in design thinking between “determinacy” and “indeter-
minacy.”71
Traditional design tries to find an calculable solution
and intervene at in determinable points.This fits in with the per-
spective that design is charged with the responsibility of dream-
ing new possibilities and bringing them to fruition. Designers
feel that problems can be broken down into solvable pieces, yet,
wicked problems are resistant to this type of thinking. They are
70
Buchanan,”Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” 97.
71
Buchanan,”Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” 97.
far too complicated and, in many cases, beyond repair. However,
design is a hopeful discipline that finds space to intervene where
it may seem impossible. Speculative critical design occupies this
space with a radical sense of hope in which designers find inspi-
ration in the indeterminate aspects of problems as opposed to the
determinate.72
Theorized by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby,
they make the distinction between “critical”and “affirmative”de-
sign in their manifesto called “A/B” [figure 08]. Critical design
highlights design’s conceptual capacities and is a design practice
that incites debate. In contrast to the passive consumption that
Geddes took advantage of,critical design evokes a response from
the user in hopes of bringing in more participatory input into
the design process. Considering that all design is future-orient-
ed,speculative critical design sits restlessly between “the real”and
“the ‘unreal’ real” often through the production of prototypes.73
Dunne and Raby suggest that once designers begin to think
outside of the marketplace they are able to open themselves up
more to the conceptual aspects of design—a design focused on
“how things could be.”74
Thus,the designed object is a prototype.
Where traditional design suggests that the conceptual parts be
distilled and focus on use-value, critical design focuses on high-
lighting the conceptual components of designs because they not
72
There are slight distinctions between Speculative and Critical design. How-
ever, I use the terms almost interchangeable as they are deeply related. De-
pending if I am referring to a situation projecting into the future, I will use the
term “speculative design.” Likewise, for designs that critique and create more
evocative responses I will use the term “critical design.”For the purposes of this
thesis I do not go in depth into the distictions of adversarial design, antidesign,
interrogative design, as well as others as I see them as incorporated under the
umbrella of speculative critical practice.
73
Anthony Dunne, and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything (Cambridge: MIT,
2013), vvi.
74
Dunne, and Raby, Speculative Everything, 11-12.
Fig. 08. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. A/B. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social
Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

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only stir ideas, but they also make us confront our ideals. They
quote moral philosopher Susan Nieman, saying,“[i]deals are not
measured by weather they conform to reality; reality is judged by
whether it lives up to ideals. Reason’s task is to deny that claims
of experience are final—and push us to widen the horizon of our
experience by providing ideas that experience ought to obey.”75
This is not to say that there is not a usefulness to critical designs,
their utility is a meta-use that focuses on their social over their
pragmatic use. Critical design responds to products that are sold
based on their worth and their utility. They challenge the per-
spective that if products are not oriented to the marketplace they
are perceived as “invalid, irrelevant, or self-indulgent, especially
if displayed in a gallery.”76
What is gained from leaving the mar-
ketplace and entering the gallery context is a laboratory setting
for the public to witness.The products are allowed to be strange
and unfamiliar in a context that encourages debate. Thus, they
are real prototypes “testing out” the possibilities in a discursive
context.77
The goal is to connect the products to people’s every-
day lives and avoid becoming a spectacle.
Furthermore, critical design stems from a radical tradition in
design inspired by designers such as Victor Papanek,from which
a new social and sustainable consciousness proposed alternate
ways of living, and, for designers, new ways of experimenting.78
Emphasizing non-conformity, Papanek argues for a design that
is altruistic,sustainable,and ethically responsible and accuses de-
75
Dunne, and Raby, Speculative Everything, 12.
76
Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and
Critical Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 84.
77
Dunne, Hertzian Tales, 67.
78
Victor Papanek, Design For The Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change
(New York: Pantheon, 1971), 133-151.
sign of focusing on “evanescent wants and desires, while the gen-
uine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer.”79
Design has always focused on the quotidian and the symbiotic
relationship we have to the environment. As such, critical design
deviates from traditional design by defamiliarizing our everyday
interactions in such a way that we suspend belief and begin to
interact with our world differently. Franke states that “fictional
design objects can invade reality and create a certain ambiguity
between the possible and the real, whereby possible worlds are
not experienced from a safe distance but as if they were part
of the real world.”80
As such, these products inhabit a liminal
space in which they garner the perception of being real (insofar
as they are material and suggestive of their said functionality)
but are not meant for mass production—thus,making them pro-
totypes for both products and, more importantly, ways of living.
Jonathan Bell suggests that Dunne and Raby’s objects are about
“transferring technology into new contexts…it is the designer
who reinterprets that which already exists.”81
Many of critical
design’s products evoke a sense of familiarity resulting in people
seeing these products as extensions of their daily lives with a
different take. Semantically, the objects have a vocabulary that
is already familiar to the people who engage with them—chairs
function as objects to sit on, bikes are meant for mobilizing, etc.
What they highlight are uncanny, ignored, and polemic aspects
of everyday life that we take for granted with the products situ-
ated in the market.
79
Papanek, Design For The Real World, 15.
80
81
Jonathan Bell,“Ruins, Recycling, Smart Buildings, and the Endlessly Trans-
formable Environment,” in Strangely Familiar Design and Everyday Life, ed.
Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 75.

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Creating “frission,” by using technologies to trigger humans
sense of adaptability to the future along with the fear, excite-
ment, and insecurity that follow, is one of the reasons Dunne
and Raby’s work situates itself out of the marketplace by way
of academic, gallery, library, and domestic contexts.82
They focus
on the “interrelationship of technology and culture” by think-
ing about how emergent technologies could be incorporated into
the everyday. Their work is centralized on producing conceptual
designs that “encourage complex and meaningful reflection on
inhabitation of a ubiquitous, dematerializing, and intelligent en-
vironment: a form of social research to integrate critical aesthetic
experience with everyday life.”83
The Placebo Project is an experi-
ment consisting of eight prototypes of conceptual products that
are placed in people’s homes. Each of the objects are reminis-
cent of products we use every day such as—the “parasite light,”
a “needy” lamp that only works when it is close to an electronic
object; similarly, the “nipple chair,” a chair that when it sens-
es electromagnetic fields, nipples protrude and vibrate into the
sitter’s torso making them aware of the field in which they may
choose to enjoy the vibration or move. These bring attention to
the invisible parts of designs, where Dunne and Raby state that
“[o]nce electronic objects enter people’s homes,they develop pri-
vate lives, or at least ones that are hidden from human vision.”84
Dunne and Raby suggest that these products allow the user to
experience the “secret life” of their electronic objects, however,
these projects go beyond that by making the user aware of elec-
82
Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind,edited by Paola Antonelli (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 15.
83
Dunne, Hertzian Tales, 147.
84
Anthony Dunne, and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic
Objects (London: August, 2001), 75.
tromagnetic fields.This forces the user to be confronted with the
fact that they do not take into account all of the things inhabit-
ing their private domiciles.85
The Placebo objects are a poetic way
to stimulate questioning of what surrounds us and why?
In order to place the objects, the designers left application
forms in a variety of public places such a Selfridges depart-
ment store, the Victoria & Albert museum, and advertisements
in home furnishing magazines. Potential adopters filled out
forms that asked them about their attitudes towards electronic
objects or peculiar experiences they might have had with elec-
tronic products and the reasons which they felt they matched
with certain objects.86
The objects were then left with the users
for a predetermined amount of time, in which they were asked
to adjust their daily rituals in accordance with these product’s
“needs.” These needs were both effects of the design as well as
what we could interpret as “malfunctions.”87
It is unusual to be
aware of electromagnetic fields unless they cause a disturbance—
such as a phone call disrupting a speaker with a reception noise.
Thus, the responses of the products gave the users insight to an
invisible aspect of the products that they were living with. On
the other hand, the products opened discussion for what design-
ers cannot do and how far their problem-solving abilities can
reach. Dunne and Raby state that “[d]esigners cannot always
solve problems, we cannot switch off the vast electromagnetic
networks surrounding us all. Although we cannot change reality,
we can change people’s perception of it.”88
The Placebo objects
85
Dunne and Raby, Design Noir, 75.
86
87
88 Dunne and Raby, Design Noir, 75.

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are products for problem-setting; by materializing what is not
solvable and bringing awareness to what is not understood about
the problem at hand they open up room for imagination and
creative uses.The people who used these products had a cautious
belief towards them, enjoying their presence with skepticism. As
such, Dunne and Raby suggest the objects, like a medical pla-
cebo, have a psychological effect. By inducing a new labor in
the everyday lives of their users, users become more aware of
their environment. The interviews of the users began to show
attachment to the products. A result of the intentionality that
went into interacting with these “needy” products was an appre-
ciation as well as confusion about the “language” these products
understood. Of interest to Dunne and Raby are the stories that
people tell about their products. Stories, for them, are a way of
explaining the invisible phenomena. Whether they were based
on fact or fictions is not important, rather they show how peo-
ple make sense of the objects around them. By incorporating
massive amounts of research and scientific data they do not rely
solely on abstraction and fictive tales. This allows for the people
engaged with the project to suspend their disbelief and immerse
themselves in this strange experience.
However, not all their work has been able to incorporate such
an immersive scale as bringing in the products into the home thus
creating a design challenge, where the prototypes are not as in-
teractive and make the fictional aspects play a larger role.In their
project, United Micro Kingdoms (2012/2013) and the continuing
Not Here, Not Now (2014), Dunne and Raby use prototypes for
a design fiction to imagine the future of the United Kingdom
after devolution, in which Wales and Scotland become separate
powers and England must decide how to approach the new fu-
ture both in terms of politics and energy futures. Each respective
kingdom has a set of values that embrace technology and design
differently.To show this, Dunne and Raby focused on transpor-
tation as one of their mediums of exploration because transpor-
tation captures the cultural imaginary.Transportation also allows
for people to think in scales because there is the thing itself as
well as the infrastructure and systems necessary to support the
vehicle.89
In this world the “Bioliberals” embrace biotechnology
and believe in a symbiotic relationship with nature, resulting in
a car made from kombucha powered by organic fuel cells. Sim-
ilarly, the Anarcho-Evolutionists also embrace biology through
DIY biohacking, but instead modify their bodies as a rejection
of making more toxic things. They create bikes that reflect their
view of a co-operative power structure to harness the resources
as a whole. On the other hand, the Digitarians and Commu-
no-Nuclearists have a greater embrace of technology. Digitar-
ians are a hyper-capitalist society governed by algorithms that
make their society run at maximum efficiency thus mobilizing
through self-driving vehicles.The Communo-Nuclearists live in
a post-work, luxury train that relies on nuclear energy in which
they are structured as a highly disciplined society. Just like in the
present, the products that these fictional communities produce
represent their cultural, moral, and political values.
What is striking about the objects at first is how they are not
built to scale. One of the main premises of industrial design is
that designers build to scale in order to make a useable simula-
crum of a product for user testing. However, these prototypes
cannot be built to scale, as they would be far too large. Instead
89
Arcfinity, “Arcfinity Visits the UMK,” Youtube video, 7:15, posted [May
2013], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqGynLMPWko.

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they work as props for the story.The object is not the important
part of the exhibition, rather it is what they suggest and they
work as entryways for larger themes that are often dealt with
in literature. In working with smaller objects, Dunne and Raby
prompt discussion about scale in way reminiscent of Charles and
Ray Eames with their film Powers of Ten. The Eames’ were giv-
ing people a sense of how human perception has changes and
expanded. Paola Antonelli states that “[d]istance is not what it
used to be, and neither is time.”90
The way in which humans un-
derstand information in the age of technology works on a variety
of scales. The United Micro Kingdoms prototypes can show big
ideas in small scale but with a similar clarity as The Powers of
Ten.They open discussion about alternatives working within the
dimensions that we are familiar with.The mind can digest these
both as small human sized objects and at the size that they are
suggestive of.Likewise,the images that coincide with the project
do not explicitly evoke the future but instead a different time.
This allows the viewer to look at them in a more ambiguous way
and infer different characteristics and perhaps project themselves
into the situation.
Because these portray a dystopian setting, the objects hope to
bring to surface anxieties and concerns that come along and ask,
“what if?” Antonelli states that “[i]f design is to help enable us
to live to the fullest while taking advantage of all the possibilities
provided by contemporary technology, designers need to make
both people and objects perfectly elastic.”91
Elasticity for the fu-
ture will require an equal understanding of human adaptability
90
Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, ed. Paola Antonelli (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 20.
91
Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, 21.
as well as limitations. Critical design is well suited to help devel-
op this elasticity because it forces the audience to confront ex-
tremes in a safe setting. Critical design allows for everything to
be questioned—from the efficacy and power attributed to design
and designers to the market and systems in which the products
inhabit (in all their scales). Prototypes, in terms of problem-set-
ting, are tokens which allow us to radically defamiliarize our-
selves from a situation so that we can radically intervene. When
reality and judgments are suspended, designers can open their
imagination and allow for things that seem improbable to be
tested out and discussed in a unique way because materialization
brings the ideas to life.

Section 06:
scenario
elasticity and
social dreaming:
prototyping today
for tomorrow

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Designers must inhabit several spaces at once—functional,
imaginative, invisible, amongst others. To be responsive to soci-
ety’s needs, design is deeply engaged in questions of politics and
social structure. It is commonplace to see research going beyond
the pragmatic and functional aspects of designed products and
co-opting the talents of design to orient people to not-yet-ex-
isting technologies and new ways of living. Design has a talent
for aiding and communicating people’s understanding through
product semantics in which designers have developed methods
of understanding the ways people “attribute meanings to arti-
facts and interact with them accordingly.”92
However, looking at
design as a method of inquiry, design also helps people navigate
situations through psychological and bodily experience through
the use of staged situations. Often, the prototyping of situations
is perceived as disingenuous, theatrical, or as a mode of enter-
tainment rather than knowledge-making. This section contrasts
these critical views in looking at work from Nelly Ben Hayoun,
92
Klaus Krippendorf, The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design (Boca
Raton: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 2.

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a self-described designer of experiences, to show how design
can be used as a form of political outreach in the form of social
dreaming.
The design of experiences creates situations for reflection
through the full immersion into a sensory experience. Ben Ha-
youn defines the design of experiences as the “engineering of a
situation that can generate disorder and critical thinking both
in the institution and amongst members of the general pub-
lic.”93
People engage with props, or prototypes, that are designed
to create the perception of a functioning “world” (a new envi-
ronment, a future scenario, political situation, etc.). Everything
from small objects to the larger setting contributes to the sense
of prototyping the social because the situation is being tested
and the objects that surround the audience are staged to make
the audience believe they are in a different world. This creates a
tension between function and, what Anthony Dunne describes
as, “para-functionality.”94
Dunne states that the term implies “a
form of design where function is used to encourage reflection on
how electronic products condition our behavior…[the] design is
within the realms of utility but attempts to go beyond conven-
tional definitions of functionalism to include the poetic.”95
The
vividness of the experience allows the audience to ask “concrete
and experiential questions: ‘What is it like to…?’ ‘How does it
feel to…?’ ‘What would it mean if…?’”96
Ben Hayoun’s work is
preoccupied with scientific themes, in which she seeks to take
93
Nelly Ben Hayoun,“Designing the Impossible,”Youtube video,35:42,posted
[May 2015], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB6YxJgi-TI&t=10s.
94
Dunne, Herzian Tales, 43.
95
Dunne, Herzian Tales, 43.
96
Björn. “Design as Inquiry,” 167.
Fig. 09. Kamioka Observatory, Pamphlet of Kamioka Observatory. Photograph. Super Kamiokande
Observatory,Tokyo. http://www.sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp (accessed May 04, 2017).
Fig. 10. Ben Hayoun, Nelly. Super K Sonic Boum. Photograph. Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios, London.
http://www.nellyben.com (accessed May 04, 2017).

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the secrets of the laboratory out into the public sphere and refers
to her practice as the “design of the impossible.”97
The “impossi-
ble,”refers to a sense of technological dreaming, in which things
that are accessible to a limited population (usually, scientists) or
things beyond human perception can be felt (atomic particles).
An example of this is the project Super K Sonic Booooum [fig-
ure 10], developed in collaboration with the particle physicists
from the Super Kamiokande in Japan. The observatory is locat-
ed one kilometer underneath the Kamioka mountain in Japan
[figure 09] and consists of a large cylindrical steel tank full of
ultra-pure water.98
The experiments that take place in this lab-
oratory help scientists understand “how matter was created in
the early universe.”99
Atoms collide in this tube creating a loud
“sonic boum”—giving the project its moniker.The design latches
onto this noise to create a poetic moment in which design and
science find common ground for making and discovery where
the public can experience what is often only experienced by sci-
entific researchers.
Ben Hayoun’s experiments integrate design with philosoph-
ic engagement because they are constructed and understood
as unique situations. The intensity of the experience fosters a
critical distance from the situation encouraging reflection. This
works in contrast to everyday situations because humans find
themselves far too immersed in their own perspective.100
Fol-
lowing in the tradition of critical design, members of the public
97
Nelly Ben Hayoun, “Designed Realities” (class lecture at Parsons The New
School for Design, New York, NY, November 2016).
98
“About Super-Kamiokande,”accessed May 1,2017,http://www-sk.icrr.u-to-
kyo.ac.jp/sk/sk/index-e.html.
99
“About Super-Kamiokande.”
100
are encouraged to debate and discuss what they experience. In
the guided journey through and at the end of the tunnel, the
audience engages in dialogue with physicists that explain the re-
search behind what the audience is experiencing. This makes it
so the experience is not only an entertaining way of engaging
with science but also gives the audience means with which they
can reflect and process.
In the studio, Ben Hayoun believes that designers, who she
describes as “creative soldiers,” have a duty to getting members
of the public engaged in their political, social, and material en-
vironment.101
Launching from Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the
“hyperreal,” in which he characterizes the world humans inhab-
it as one of simulations where media and spectacle constitute
contemporary society instead of the traditional political econo-
my, design needs to respond to these hyperreal conditions.102
In
her work dealing with space, from the Soyuz Chair [figure 11], a
chair that simulates the three stages of rocket liftoff into space,
to the International Space Orchestra and Disaster Playground,
projects that create theatrical reenactments of NASA protocol,
Ben Hayoun designs for the hyperreal by delving into the ma-
teriality of these experiences and making abstract experiences
tangible. The projects bring to light the fragility of humans and
the systems that we create as well as how that is in tension with
the incommensurability of design. In Disaster Playground, Ben
Hayoun shows the immense body of knowledge that astronomic
observers have. However, in the case of a giant meteor hitting
101
“Mission,” Univeristy of the Underground, last modified May 2, 2017,
http://universityoftheunderground.org/mission.
102
Jean Baudrillard,Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press, 1994), 1.

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the Earth, she demonstrates how the systems that humans have
established to make us feel safe would have minimal to no effect.
She shows how difficult it is to research inbound space objects,
how many people are needed for this research,and how the com-
munication systems require a great deal of luck. Ben Hayoun
does not reduce the systems to a theatrical display for peace of
mind, instead she turns the question inward to reflect on how
we believe humans design the world when in fact, the world also
designs us in a cyclical fashion. Thus, she reclaims dialogue by
bringing it into the public realm through a multidisciplinary
sphere. Social dreaming, in which she makes her projects resem-
ble a public spectacle, create a sense of collectivity by allowing
the general public to experience things we only wish we could
experience—such as space travel.

Staged situations stimulate reflection from direct experi-
ence.103
Where prototypes usually work in the form of two sepa-
rate bodies working out a problem, staged situations create open
discourse in the tradition of critical design. The experience is
bodily and totally incorporated into the design—not separate
or objective when in the act allowing for philosophic inquiry to
stem from a very personal experience embedded in materiality.It
is after that the audience can reflect and use the knowledge they
gain from the experience to see new possibilities and gain new
perspective.The ability to leave the situation makes the space op-
timal for questioning. The situation and the feelings stirred can
materialize new questions and stimulate new ideas.Furthermore,
being embedded in materiality clearly puts this form of research
within the realm of design but is open to multidisciplinary dis-
103
Fig 11. Ben Hayoun, Nelly. Soyouz Chair. Photograph. Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios, London. http://
www.nellyben.com (accessed May 04, 2017).

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course. The experiences and crafting of these experiences brings
out the useful faculties of design to operationalize and manifest
ideas and leaves space for anthropological,political,and scientific
inquiry. Ben Hayoun’s work shows charisma and optimism even
in the face of scary and mysterious prospects.The hope could be
that in seeing the possibilities people with be able to innovate in
such a way that allows them to flourish by developing empathy
and embracing new perspectives. Just like traditional prototypes,
these situations will allow for people to see what is functional in
society and what needs to be improved.
Section 07:
conclusion
philosophy
of design

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Conclu-
sion
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.104
- Wallace Stevens
Nelly Ben Hayoun suggests that the designer is the “mytholo-
gist” of modern times, to borrow from Roland Barthes’ termi-
nology.105
The mythologist is a specific person in our society that
has the duty to analyze the everyday, in which when they return
to the public their speech has a political viewpoint. Designers,
then, digest the signs in our everyday lives and bring them back
into the public to be reanalyzed.106
Myth normalizes viewpoints;
thus, designers, as mythologists, need to reveal how this affects
members of the public. The mythologist stands outside of the
104
Wallace Stevens, “Chocorua to Its Neighbor,” in The Collected Poems of Wal-
lace Stevens (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1954), 300.
105
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972).
106
Hayoun, “Designing the Impossible.”

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situation; thus, in thinking about design as a proposition, staged
situation, inquiry, or prototype, the designer speaks from a deep-
ly intimate perspective. The designer “acts the object,” they do
not speak about it in a way that they are “transitively linked.”107
For this reason, the designer is an exceptional member of society
that supports the culture—in which design seeks to make this
the responsibility of the public.

This thesis has continued the tradition that design studies re-
turns to the object to produce critique and proposed that it look
to prototypes as powerful moment full of critical potential. It is a
process that involves everyone in the production of product, but
more importantly in what Elaine Scarry refers to as the “making
and unmaking of the world.”108
She states that “[t]he interior
structure of the object has been attended to because it contains
the material record of the interior and invisible action.”109
Fol-
lowing this logic, prototypes appear to be the most vivid place
for imaginative discovery. They are a place that acts both in the
abstract and material world, existing yet not fully materializing.
They are places where the material drives the concept, working
to manifest unforeseen problems as well as the extraordinary
parts of the design concept. Looking at the Eames’, designing
became a way of life and way for playful discoveries. Initial fail-
ures with the low-back chair taught them important design les-
sons in which they needed to design for the material as opposed
to making materials fit their concepts. Gradually, this knowl-
edge brought them to the point in which they began designing
how we understand large concept in films such as the Powers of
107
Barthes, Mythologies, 258.
108
Scarry, The Body in Pain.
109
Ten.This move to a theoretical approach was an indicator of the
deeper things designers think about and the depth with which
they are negotiating the world around them.
Critical design follows in these experimental footsteps, but
makes an important change in which the public should be more
involved and thinking about design and the repercussions that it
brings into the world. It makes evident that design is not inno-
cent but, in fact, straddling between being impolite and empa-
thetic.110
The objects that we make and consume show our values.
Critical practices underline this and make the audience think
about alternatives through a visceral experience that ask, “is this
how we should live?”Critical designs as thought experiments are
not fake objects to illustrate ideas, they are objects that integrate
in the fabric of everyday life through design and allow deep re-
flection over possible futures. They are tools for understanding.
They are “poetic objects”that show us alternatives to how we live
and all the implications that come with putting these objects
into the world.111
Thus, in looking at the prototype, this thesis proposes that
thinking through material reclaims something lost in abstraction
and makes philosophy “real.”Moral reasoning should not remain
abstract or conceptual—but should lead to action. Likewise, the
question of “how ought we to live,” a normative question in
philosophy, easily resonates with that of the designer and the
iterative process of design. Design never intends to remain con-
ceptual, but rather seeks to concert action from its users towards
a type of collective action. Designers have a responsibility to act
ethically and design studies seeks to further these goals through
110
Hayoun, “Designing the Impossible.”
111
Björn. “Design as Inquiry.”

78
///////
How
Ought
weto
Live?
multidisciplinary action. Design is thus moving closer to the
realm of philosophy with new methods and cross-disciplinary
collaborations. To conclude, design studies may propose this: if
philosophy, by definition, is the “love of wisdom”it would follow
that design is its most revered art. If we were to combine design
with philosophy perhaps we could consider this “the art of liv-
ing.” Both, design and philosophy, seek to answer the questions
of what is the good life and give means for which to achieve
such.Where philosophy can launch us out into an ethereal world
of knowledge, design can bring that knowledge back down to
earth and respond with empathy to human needs.
Section 08:
bibliography

81
///////
Section
08:
Bibliog-
raphy
Works Cited
Antonelli, Paola. Design and the Elastic Mind, edited by Paola
Antonelli. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008.
Arcfinity.“Arcfinity Visits the UMK.”Youtube video, 7:15. Post-
ed [May 2013]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqGyn-
LMPWko.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1994.
Bell, Jonathan. “Ruins, Recycling, Smart Buildings, and the
Endlessly Transformable Environment.”In Strangely Familiar
Design and Everyday Life,edited by Andrew Blauvelt.Minne-
apolis: Walker Art Center, 2003.
Ben Hayoun, Nelly. “Designed Realities.” Class lecture at Par-
sons The New School for Design, New York, NY, November
2016.
Ben Hayoun, Nelly. “Designing the Impossible.” Youtube vid-
eo, 35:42. Posted [May 2015], https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tB6YxJgi-TI&t=10s.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.”
In Design Studies A Reader, edited by Hazel Clark and David
Brody. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009.
Chick, Anne and Paul Micklethwaite. “Design as a Field.” In
Design for Sustainable Change: How Design and Designers Can
Drive the Sustainability Agenda. Lausanne, Switzerland: Ava
Pub., 2011.
Cranz, Galen. The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Cross, Nigel. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer

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