Prototyping crisis of representation

Prototyping is a moment in a designers' practice that assembles objects to represent a future product or service. This creative experience exists in order to predict the project's chances of failure or success. When prototyping begins, words and ideas should become mock-ups.

After my first experience in the Social Lab, I have kept developing projects within design methodologies of research. The projects are completely different though. It is not the same course or program. But what strikes me the most is that even with the exercise becoming more constant in my life, every time I do it I see a pattern of uncertainty about what I am doing.

Looking back to the studio design class, I remember being harshly criticized by designers for asking too many questions about the process of turning ideas into objects “You have to be more open minded,” I remember them saying. “If you ask too much, we will never move on,” or something along those lines. So I would shut down to not compromise the development of the class - after all I was not even a regular student in that program. But I would keep wondering what their thinking process was.

But my questions were coming from a deeper place. For me it was an epistemological struggle of transforming words and ideas into forms and objects; it was my own prototyping ‘crises of representation’.

The day when I was cutting the iridescent paper to build a cylinder for the prototype of my current project, I was delighted. I loved the feeling of building something with my bare hands, of wrapping my mind around figuring out how to fit a cardboard circle into the bottom of a cylinder. But nevertheless a prototype is not just an idea materialized. It is the representation of a message, and I guess I am intrigued by it because like ethnography it is the translation of life in motion, into static symbols, which through their materiality have to bring vitality back to what was previously inscribed on them.