Prototype Scenarios and the Making of the Future in the Engineers’ Laboratories

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05.

Abstract

The paper presents empirical insights and conceptual considerations on how researchers and engineers in their ongoing work of inventing new technological methods, processes and devices are influenced by imaginations about the future. The empirical data are gained from studying research and development in the field of ubiquitous computing. In this field of research and development the protagonists often refer to situational scenarios, a particular type of images of the future that allows for considerable concreteness and detail. Situational scenarios are present in the innovation work we studied in different manifestations: as narrative scenarios, as implicit scenarios, or as prototype scenarios. In this paper we focus on prototype scenarios. They are, according to our definition, more or less comprehensive implementations of the components a situational scenario within more or less realistic laboratory settings. As we will show, prototype scenarios possess unique features as mediators between the fictional reality of an imagination and the empirical reality of the existing world. This is because prototype scenarios participate at both realities simultaneously. The paper describes and discusses three different effects and uses in innovation processes that are connected to this particular position of prototype scenarios: specification, evaluation, and demonstration.

Authors

• Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, Technical University of Berlin

• Martin Meister, University of Duisburg-Essen