Abstract
This paper describes the evolution of the concept of ‘design demonstrator’ in the field of industrial design which has been influenced by technological advancements and the increasing complexity of design problems. It compares it with the concept of ‘prototype’ from the perspective of the future conjecture. While both concepts aim to represent the designer’s imagination, there is a difference between them: unlike prototypes, demonstrators are conceptual in their focus and are used for communication purposes rather than evaluation (Bobbe et al., 2023). In design research, prototypes and demonstrators are used for the opposite goals: converging and diverging the research area respectively, which is crucial for ‘designerly’ 2nd order cybernetics approaches, research THROUGH design and research AS design (inaccessible, inwards) (Chow and Jonas, 2008). The study of demonstrators began with obtaining by the authors personal experiential knowledge through making a demonstrator for a client. The introspective reflection on it together with the analysis of an established set of demonstrators allowed them to narrow down the area of interest and formulate a working definition of a demonstrator as at least a partially physical one-off design object that facilitates the interests of designer, client, user, and technology, and communicate them to the audience in an interactive way. The authors suggest using the design practice perspective to study the conceptual nature of demonstrators and explore them as practice in line with associative, speculative, and critical design. This lens outlines the next direction of the research related to the aspect of ‘materialization of the future’.
Keywords
Demonstrator; prototype; design research; inaccessible research; design practice
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.155
Citation
Sviridova, A.,and Verlinden, J.(2023) Materialization of the Future: The Demarcation Line between Prototypes and Demonstrators, in Silvia Ferraris, Valentina Rognoli, Nithikul Nimkulrat (eds.), EKSIG 2023: From Abstractness to Concreteness – experiential knowledge and the role of prototypes in design research, 19–20 June 2023, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.155
Creative Commons License
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Materialization of the Future: The Demarcation Line between Prototypes and Demonstrators
This paper describes the evolution of the concept of ‘design demonstrator’ in the field of industrial design which has been influenced by technological advancements and the increasing complexity of design problems. It compares it with the concept of ‘prototype’ from the perspective of the future conjecture. While both concepts aim to represent the designer’s imagination, there is a difference between them: unlike prototypes, demonstrators are conceptual in their focus and are used for communication purposes rather than evaluation (Bobbe et al., 2023). In design research, prototypes and demonstrators are used for the opposite goals: converging and diverging the research area respectively, which is crucial for ‘designerly’ 2nd order cybernetics approaches, research THROUGH design and research AS design (inaccessible, inwards) (Chow and Jonas, 2008). The study of demonstrators began with obtaining by the authors personal experiential knowledge through making a demonstrator for a client. The introspective reflection on it together with the analysis of an established set of demonstrators allowed them to narrow down the area of interest and formulate a working definition of a demonstrator as at least a partially physical one-off design object that facilitates the interests of designer, client, user, and technology, and communicate them to the audience in an interactive way. The authors suggest using the design practice perspective to study the conceptual nature of demonstrators and explore them as practice in line with associative, speculative, and critical design. This lens outlines the next direction of the research related to the aspect of ‘materialization of the future’.