GENE DUVAL

***Design Contract***

Thesis project by Leticia Cartier Oxley

MA Design Studies, Parsons School of Design

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Prototyping has always been an ally to the designer. The purpose of prototyping is to operationalize research, suggesting a clear material process from concept to completion. The creative tension embodied by the prototype comes from its peculiar position in the design process. At the same time, it refines research problems and questions through multiple iterations, but it also translates abstract and incomplete ideas to material possibilities. Prototypes, however embryonic, draw together the inchoate as a rehearsal of what might emerge via the design process. They are evolutionary precursors to final products, and, thus occupy a double ontological status as materialized models of a potential real thing (“This!”), and as a proposition (“This?”). It is this ambiguity and what this allows, that gives prototypes their capacity for communication and their faculty for research. From anthropology to policy making, prototyping has been adopted as a methodological approach and as a way to materialize solutions. This capstone examines the operational and speculative roles of prototyping through a series of case studies situating the prototype both historically and showing the ways in which designers are taking up prototyping as a form of speculative critical practice to rehearse and contemplate possible futures.

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My role:

• Designed cover, table of content, and main layout for this thesis book. 

• Supported with editing and narratives.