No. 0
Prototyping Prototyping
Before there was Limn, there were several different prototypes. The first was occasioned by a conference: on prototypes. Held in Madrid in November of 2010, and organized by Adolpho Estalella and Alberto Corsín Jimenez, it was a conference for which this issue was imagined as a kind of pre-conference publication–another riff on the prototype. Many of the problems Limn seeks to address were worked out in part through this conference and the publication: from the use of new media, to the function of conferences and conference papers, to the idea of a publication that precedes or determines a social event. Issue Number Zero was very much a prototype, and bears the traces of that concept and the discussion of it by the generous participants.
Published November 2010
In This Issue
Prototyping Prototyping: a pre-conference publication
A publication organized prior to the conference and constructed in time (though only barely) to circulate there. For some, this experiment provided a way to reflect on the relationship of presentation and writing, and the ways that conferences structure and circulate expectations about what kind of work can and should be done there, as opposed ...
The Long History of Prototypes
Michael Guggenheim The conference organisers Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella state at the beginning of their invitation: “prototypes have acquired certain prominence and visibility in recent times”. What I want to focus on is what the words “visibility” and “recent times” may mean in the above sentence. The problem here is that the conference ...
The prototype: a sociology in abeyance
Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella Could we speak of a saint as a prototype for a religious movement or of a clue as a prototype for a crime? Writing in the early 20th century, philosopher Max Scheler thought that heroes, saints and geniuses played a prototypical role for larger models of social organisation.[1] Scheler ...
If I were the ethnographer…
Marilyn Strathern To what might an anthropologist wish to attach the term prototype? Prompted by Christopher Kelty’s reference to a conference publication preceding the conference, I recall a slim volume I brought out before a short seminar series held in 2004.[1] The volume does not really count as a prototype since it was not meant ...
The Charismatic Prototype
Alain Pottage, LSE Prototyping is a charismatic figure: no sooner does one have it in mind than one begins to see it at work everywhere. This is testimony to the astuteness of the organizers’ vision, and the reflexive twist of Chris’s call to prototype ‘prototyping’ invites us to explore the ‘prototyping moment’ that is seized ...
The Law of Patents for Useful Inventions by William C. Robinson (1890)
Of Promises and Prototypes: the archaeology of the future
“It’s just we wanted, we needed something for the deployment which would kind of work in a general way. […] So there were problems with it, it’s not a kind of definitive answer, but it certainly found its uses.” Drawing on the analogy of a box filled with mementos, stored under the bed, or in ...
The End of Innovation (As We Knew It)
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University ‘The future arrives sooner here.’ I’m driving my car down Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto, California one evening around 1995 and I hear this assertion on U.S. National Public Radio, spoken by a Silicon Valley technologist who’s being interviewed. It elicits a familiar response – a certain tightening in my stomach, ...
Prototyping Prototyping :: Second Iteration
Lucy Suchman Our conference prototype – the document created by Chris – had the prototypical characteristic of just-in-time production, which meant that I’ve only been able to engage with it properly after the fact. Doing so was a pleasure, and leaves me wishing now for another iteration of the conference. But at least ARCEpisode2 provides ...
Demo for Democracy
by: Javier Lezaun Suppose you wanted to test the reality of democracy. Tired of claims and counter-claims, of endless debates about ideals and aspirations, and deeply unconvinced by the arguments of political philosophers, you would like to produce some real, hard facts; to verify, once and for all, that democracy really exists – that it ...
Protoyping Democracies
Experimental Studies in the Social Climates of Groups A film by Kurt Lewin. Discussed in Javier Lezaun’s “Demo for Democracy”
Infra(proto)types In the Air
by: Nerea Calvillo Presentation as a prototype itself: opens questions through the material of In the Air, a project which makes visible the components of the air. A degree of skill and experience is necessary to effectively use prototyping as a design verification tool. (Wikipedia) Prototypical methodology. A prototype is generally object oriented, but it ...
Prototypes in Design: Materializing Futures
Alex Wilkie The two excerpts that follow are drawn from my Ph.D. research User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study. The thesis is an examination of the role of multiple users in user-centered design (UCD) processes and is based on a six-month ethnographic field study of designers employed to apply the principles and practices of ...
Prototyping relationships: on techno-political hospitality
Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella, CSIC, Spanish National Research Council When drafting the original call for papers that led to the ‘Prototyping cultures’ conference, we noted that the figure of the ‘prototype’ had recently emerged as a currency of explanation and description in a number of para-laboratory contexts: from classical industrial and engineering sites ...
Cross-Cultural Partnership: TEMPLATE and HOWTO
[From The Cross Cultural Partnership website. Discussed by James Leach in his presentation.–ed] DRAFT version 0.3, September 2007 Preamble The cross-cultural partnership template is designed to help potential collaborators to reach understanding and agreement on the terms of their collaboration. In many contexts people look to the law to establish or enforce a ‘safe space’ ...
Para-sites: a Proto-Prototyping Culture of Method?
George Marcus, UC Irvine [this text discusses the “Para-Sites” project of the Center for Ethnography and it’s first event, on death penalty mitigation (see exhibit Y) — ed.] Classic anthropological ethnography, especially in its development in the apprentice project/dissertation form, was designed to provide answers, or at least data, for questions that anthropology had for ...
The Para-site in Ethnographic Research Projects
A Project of the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine While the design and conduct of ethnographic research in anthropology is still largely individualistic, especially in the way that research is presented in the academy, many projects depend on complex relationships of partnership and collaboration, at several sites, and not just those narrowly conceived ...
A prototype para-site event: death penalty mitigation
by George Marcus, in coversation with Jesse Cheng [This exhibit relates to the “Parasites” project discussed by George Marcus. –ed.] The first Para-site event at the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine occurred on November 5,2006. Jesse Cheng, an advanced graduate student, studied a movement among activist lawyers to mitigate the death penalty in capital ...
Prototyping Prototyping: A Preface
by: Christopher M. Kelty Prototyping Prototyping, began as a conference publication that was finished before the conference. Its goal was to be a “prototype” of a conference on prototyping cultures. Participants were invited 2 weeks ahead of time to submit a short piece, and nearly everyone involved did so. I’m tempted to say: prototyping works. ...
001: Prototyping Prototyping
What is a prototype and why is it a salient contemporary figure? This collection of writings was provoked by a conference, held in Madrid in November 2010. The goal was to “prototype” a conference publication before the conference itself, both as a demonstration of the process envisioned by ARC studio, and as a way to ...