I was just poking through old posts looking for an old Rorty quote (roughly, “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed…” when came upon an old post from July 2021, where I realized something simple and shocking: language is one prototyping material. And I will add now, it is often not the best one, but it is inexpensive. Talk is cheap. And anyone who sits in meetings all day will tell you, it is inexhaustibly plentiful.
Whenever I think about prototyping, the same image comes to mind.
It is a bad digital image of an improvised artifact someone at IDEO hacked together using whatever materials were sitting around to communicate an idea for a surgical instrument that could be gripped in a new way. They grabbed a cheap plastic clip, a 35mm film canister and a white board marker and hastily taped it together. The thing induced a collective eureka and eventually became a real product used by real surgeons.
In the Rorty / linguistic prototyping post I announced an intention to make a linocut print of the IDEO prototype.
Reading this today, I experienced a moment of smug self-satisfaction, for soon after I’d written this, I radically one-upped myself. It occurred to me that it would be even better to have a sculpture of that archetypal prototype! So I painstakingly tracked down the original materials and reproduced that prototype. And then I mounted the reproduction in a shadow box for display. I will not pretend I was not proud of both the idea and the execution.
My feelings toward this object are bittersweet. For years, when I still belonged at my organization — back when prototyping was central to our thinking methods — the prototype archetype reproduction was on loan to my organization, and sat proudly in our lobby to remind us of who we were and to provoke questions from visitors.
Now that everything we do is reports and words and talking and projections and plans and complicated system models, we are no more designerly and no less corporate than our clients. This symbolic artifact that once served as quirky evidence of who we were became a phony poseur prop, so I recalled it and moved it to a location where it was still true.
But enough crybabying over losing a home I helped build, furnish and ensoul. This is how things go. This is why I always say: “Bros before cos.” Never trust an organization.
Wah, wah, etc., etc. — I have an idea.
I am returning to this idea of printing the prototype.
I am imagining a small card with a lino image of the IDEO prototype, with lead typeset slogans beneath it:
Stop talking. Start making.
or
Prototype it.
or
We think also with our hands and hearts.
or maybe an edition of each of the three.
Wow, I want this to exist.
I want to own it myself, and I want every designer who is still a designer to have one.
This is what I love most about letterpress.
I’m not in it to express myself or to strut around showing what I can do.
I am motivated by pure avarice. I want something to exist that doesn’t yet exist, so I can have it.
And then I become more generally offended at that thing’s nonexistence.
So I make it exist. And then I get to have that thing, and enjoy that thing’s existence.
There is a beautiful, true, dense and compact book that should exist.
It does not exist, and its nonexistence is my responsibility.
Its mysterious absence is increasingly obtrusive and painful.
I feel it like a futural phantom limb.