Introduction to AL 444: Prototyping, Spring 2020 (Part 2)

This document is the second of two posts intended to serve as a complement to our introductory discussions in the course, AL 444: Prototyping, a user-experience design course conducted at MSU in the Spring Semester of 2020. You can find the first post here.

Can you “prototype” a better world? (A provocation for in-class discussions as well as a prelude to the final project of the semester)

The idea of prototyping conjures up, for me, a certain ambivalence that I have always struggled to put my finger on. This ambivalence has also made it difficult to think through what kind of course called “prototyping” I actually want to teach. One of my professors in graduate school suggests that examining the ambivalence and the source of the resistance that generates it is probably helpful. So let’s take a brief detour to talk about some other issues that are connected, in some ways deeply, in some ways peripherally, to the concept of “prototyping,” especially as it pertains to UX design.

I feel that there remains an implied “rapid” in front of “prototyping” from the early enthusiasm around 3D printing and cheap microcontrollers (e.g., Arduinos) that I experienced working in advertising in the early- and mid-aughts. Rapid prototyping and its attendant technologies never gave us the kind of democratized material abundance that some folks thought it promised. This is, in part, because of the structural constraints — the (political-economic) system in which those technologies were created and the values and ideas about society embedded within them (e.g., competition, individualism, neocolonialist material extraction and labor exploitation). Prototyping and its current cultural connotations are part of a limited ontological imagination—the imagination about how it is possible or not possible to be in the world—cultivated by design in the patriarchal, capitalist, individualist, competitive global North.

We’ve seen the devastating consequences of Silicon Valley’s formerly cherished mantra of “move fast and break things.” So it seems that the “speed” element of prototyping is already, thankfully, devalued in many senses. But sometimes it’s good to do things quickly, to get almost-immediate feedback from the materialization of an idea right in front of you. Indeed, “A stagnant society would be as untenable as a society of endless acceleration” [3] (and are we not approaching the latter?). Nonetheless, it’s always important to ask what are you doing quickly? And is it something that should be done quickly? Are you sure? The kind of prototyping done in user-experience design has certain connotations that link it directly with tech-industry concepts such as the “Minimum Viable Product” (but how “minimum-ly viable” should a car be, Mr. Musk?) and the hackathon (which presumes that technology as a purportedly apolitical intervention can solve a major [and inherently political] problem in a very short period of time with very little consideration of the implications of the proposed intervention).[4] What kind of things, I wonder, should we really be prototyping, anyway?

Oddly, the neoliberal, Silicon-Valley-individualist ethos that is tied to the problematic nature of hackathons emerges from the Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. This transition and the manifestation in Silicon Valley of the anti-politics of the Counterculture after its split from the New Left is examined in detail by Fred Turner in his masterful From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Despite the (possibly unintentional) consequences of the retreat of certain facets of the Left from “politics” as such, social upheaval in the 60s and 70s might be worth considering when discussing the future of the concept of “prototyping,” and what value it might hold for us as we grapple with the myriad problems of our world today which are themselves structural and systemic.

The turmoil of the late 60s led to the rise of a number of autonomous, experimental communities that sprang up around the US and Europe. These communities—part of the retreat from capitalism, war, and politics writ large—functioned, for their participants, as “prototypes” of a different society. It was where new ideas about how we could relate to one another and to the world around were tried, and, mostly, where they failed. Semi-autonomous communal experimentation, which always includes political decisions that determine the dynamics of power relationships among community members, might be one way to consider what the process of “prototyping” a different world would look like. [5] What does it look like to, in Francisco Varela’s words, “find one’s own way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of one’s own resources?” [6] What does an anti-xenophobic, cosmopolitan localism [7] entail/require from the behavior of its citizens? Complete energy/resource independence? Or a shift in patterns of production/consumption and a radical appreciation/respect for the spaces, non-humans, and people that produce the resources that do get used? What kinds of interventions could cultivate these shifts in behavior? This gets to the core of some of the ambivalence I have with “prototyping”—are our tools so steeped in and infused with the ideologies of extractivist capital that to prototype a different kind of society requires the design of new tools?

But in the Global South, the stakes for the development of autonomous communities are much higher and the consequences of their failure/success much larger. In Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar writes that, “In Latin America the call for autonomy involves not only a critique of formal democracy but an attempt to construct an altogether different form of rule anchored in people’s lives, a struggle for liberation and for a new type of society in harmony with other peoples and cultures.” This struggle is situated within lands and peoples ravaged by colonialism and the Global North’s imposition of structural adjustment and its attendant privatization and deregulation—the “destruction of communal worlds” as Escobar writes. Nations and peoples just beyond the borders of the US are living the dystopian scenarios about which “speculative designers” design [8], and are enacting (and prototyping) new forms of social and political relations as we speak. And we should be learning from them.

If we want to build a new society, a more just economy, or even a more equitable university here at our home at MSU, how can we begin to do so? These are massive, systems-oriented design problems — problems which will require a great deal of “prototyping.” In some way, I see the concept of “prototyping” and whether one thinks it’s possible to prototype at the scale of “community” or “society” as being at the heart of questions about a transition to different political-economic systems (e.g., socialism or “luxury communism”) posed by writers such as Erik Olin Wright [9] and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams [10].

In this sense, it’s possible that we need to expand our ideas of what prototyping can be. A prototype for a new way of approaching university education, for example, might not look like what the User-Experience Design Industry would view as a “prototype.” But a spirit of experimentalism that pushes the most important issues to the fore, that produces the kind of (democratic) experimentation which Erik Olin Wright suggests is essential to building a more just society might not look like the kind of practices we as designers have today. If we believe that “every community practices the design of itself,” and that “people are practitioners of their own knowledge,” [11] then the kinds of things that might be prototyped in response to design proposals are practices themselves. Take, for example, the concept of exchange and currency. Can communities develop autonomous/self-determined practices of the exchange/provisioning of goods and services? Things like BerkShares and other local currencies are examples (though small and still operational within a broader capitalist system) of attempts at increasing local autonomy and the prototyping of a different form of society. Just like “electronics” might be part of a larger interaction design project, so “exchange/good-service provision/currency” might be considered a “prototype-able” part of a larger “community-design project.”

How might we, in the words of Ezio Manzini, design the “shared images and stories that underlie a new idea of well-being,” propose and prototype the conditions under which this idea becomes viable, and naturalize the very ontological orientation in which we actively choose this notion of well-being? What spaces in our own communities (class, major, neighborhood, dorm, committee, etc.) can we find to prototype the practices that point towards alternative modes of being?

Notes

[3] Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973.

[4] A point that I will likely not make often enough, this semester, though I will try, is that all prototypes are political because all design is political: there are inherently relations of power involved throughout.

[5] These communities are chronicled in The Modern Utopian, a book about utopian experimental communities of the 60s and 70s compiled by Richard Fairfield.

[6] Varela, quoted in Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse.

[7] See Cameron Tonkinwise’s “Designing Cosmopolitan Localism in the Era of Xenophobia” (2015)

[8] See Ahmed Ansari’s critique of Speculative and Critical Design at MIT’s “Knotty Objects” conference in 2015.

[9] See Wright’s How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century (2019)

[10] See Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015)

[11] Escobar, p.184–185