Prototyping the Past

IntroductionNew technologies can now be used to fabricate old ones. With rapid prototyping techniques, a nineteenth-century mechanism from Cornell University's Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL)1 can be downloaded, translated into code, fed to a 3-D printer, and used to repair a watch, all in about an hour. While 3-D fabrication tends to fetishize objects, in the following paragraphs I propose an alternative for media studies: "prototyping the past," which prompts scholars to remake technologies that no longer function, no longer exist, or may have only existed as fictions, illustrations, or one-offs. Conceptually, prototyping the past understands technologies as entanglements of culture, materials, and design, and it explains how and why technologies matter by approaching them as representations and agents of history. Practically, it is a trial-and-error negotiation across modes of 2-D and 3-D production, and it creates media that function simultaneously as evidence and arguments for interpreting the past. Yet most important, it does more than re-contextualize media history in the present. It integrates that history into the social, cultural, and ethical trajectories of design.More common in art, design, engineering, and architecture than the humanities, rapid prototyping entails producing materials through a combination of computer numerical control (CNC) machines - such as 3-D printers (additive manufacturing) and routers (subtractive manufacturing)2 - with manual approaches to wood, paper, clay, cardboard, and the like. The aim is to subject a model to repeated feedback and hands-on use throughout the development process. In this sense, the design cycles are small, not grand. Also, the models are versioned. Instead of working toward a single model for all audiences and contexts, multiple models are maintained and tested throughout production. This approach is steeped in "design-in-use," which privileges situated activity over some ideal model or user (Botero, 2013).3 Through design-in-use, a prototype is treated like a congealed dialogue or relationship between interested groups. Recalling Marx, it is necessarily social.Given common associations of rapid prototyping with waste and trinkets, researchers should be skeptical of enthusiastic applications of CNC techniques to media history. One reason not to integrate CNC into scholarly inquiry is solely for the sake of wow or whiz-bang (Sayers, 2015a). All too often, CNC machines, especially 3-D printers, are gadgets unrelated to research, and they are quite conducive to a "print now, think later" mentality. Other reasons to avoid rapid prototyping include the learning curve, the costs of acquiring and maintaining CNC machines, and the labour demanded by the manufacturing and post-production process. Additionally, scholars who stress process over product may worry that prototypes - as objects - too easily mask the decisions involved in making them.4With such concerns in mind, below are a few reasons why scholars of media history may wish to experiment with prototyping the past as part of their research. These reasons are informed by materialist media history5 and inspired by the work of Kari Kraus (2009), Anne Balsamo (2011), Leah Buechley (2012), Hannah Perner-Wilson (2012), Morgan Ames (2014), Larissa Hjorth (2014), Kat Jungnickel (2014), and Daniela Rosner (2014). They also correspond in part with arguments published in "New Old Things" (2012), by Devon Elliott, Robert MacDougall, and William J. Turkel. There, Elliott et al. express two important points. First, "matter [is] a new medium for historical research. Working with actual, physical stuff offers the historian new opportunities to explore the interactions of people and things" (2012, p. 122). Second, prototypes may be understood as situations for interpretation, without an impulse to create exact reproductions of historical artifacts (2012, p. 127). Reading these two points together, the use of matter as a medium for historical research need not fetishize the past. …