Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.

This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.

This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.

This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process.

This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.