Prototyping Dialogues

For designers and design researchers, the ecological crisis and the quest for sustainability do not only mean a re-orientation in what design provides in terms of products, services, and systems. It also demands a change in how design is done, acknowledging that sustainable design and use have to co-evolve through speculative dialogues addressing a radical re-configuration of both the crafts of making and the crafts of use.
This paper is an attempt to revisit one of the key tenants of contemporary design practice, the prototype, to find a language of prototyping that can sensitize us to what evolves when engaging with future sustainable practices through such speculative dialogues.
In this paper, we dive into three co-explorative design engagements of a research project on sustainable knitwear design to further explore what we call prototyping dialogues. Through these accounts of prototyping dialogues, we argue that prototypes are outcomes of the dialogues rather than distinct proposals from the designer to be iteratively presented and evaluated. Furthermore, we suggest that the prototype, as an outcome, comes about through a dialectic between different modes of engagement which we term the ‘experiential’ and the ‘experimental’, having both material, performative, and speculative manifestations in the collaborative encounters.