If I, some time ago, were to answer whether the prototype was important to my design practice, the answer would probably have been: not really. Perhaps not at all.
That answer has changed. Not because my way of working has fundamentally shifted, but because my understanding of what a prototype is has.
This is a prototype
A while back I came across the question of whether it is possible, as a designer, to work solely with prototypes. At the time, I did not fully understand what was at stake, but something about the question stayed with me.
Later, I met a designer who described one of his projects as always being in beta. That phrasing clarified something. It resonated.
The idea of keeping something in a state of beta reflects a condition I recognize—not only in design, but in the world more broadly. A state of flux. Something moving. Continuously adapting.
From this perspective, the notion of a final result begins to dissolve. What we call an outcome is simply a temporary stabilization—a result of specific conditions at a given moment in time. Under different circumstances, it might have taken a completely different form.
In this sense, projects do not end. They transform. One result feeds into the next. A continuous trajectory rather than a closed loop.
The prototype as a question
One way of understanding the prototype is as an embodied question—an idea made material in order to provoke new questions.
This shifted something in my understanding.
The prototype is not only a mindset—a way of allowing things to remain open or unfinished. It is also an artifact. A tool. Something that gives form to uncertainty.
From this point of view, prototyping is not a phase in my process. It is the process.
Working primarily with graphic design, I rarely construct what would traditionally be considered prototypes. Instead, I sketch. I test. I iterate rapidly—on paper, on screen. These fragments, these temporary forms, are rarely labeled as prototypes.
But they function as such.
They materialize questions.
Cracks, joints, and movement
What interests me in this understanding is not only how prototypes function as tools for the designer, but how they operate more broadly.
In many contemporary practices—particularly within software—prototypes are opened up to users. Beta versions invite participation. Feedback becomes part of development.
Yet these interactions are often directed toward predefined goals. The questions asked are those that help refine a solution.
But what if the prototype could do something else?
If understood as something in transformation, the prototype does not only change itself. It has the capacity to transform its user—and the context in which it exists.
Through what is left undefined, space emerges. A space for interpretation. For completion.
This is something I have found myself returning to in my own work: the value of the unfinished.
These “cracks” can exist on multiple levels. They may be aesthetic—traces that resist clear explanation. Or functional—gaps in meaning that require the user’s participation.
The crack is not a flaw. It can be understood as a joint: something that allows movement. Something that enables the artifact to shift in relation to its context.
An object in motion.
Approaching the not yet
Sociologist Barbara Adam writes about the future as something that can be materialized—a “not yet” that becomes tangible in the present. It is not a distant abstraction, but something that takes form through the ways we act, design, and construct our surroundings.
This perspective makes something visible in the prototype.
Through its state of incompletion, the prototype holds multiple temporalities at once. It carries traces of the past, operates in the present, and gestures toward possible futures. It becomes a way of engaging with what does not yet fully exist.
In parallel, design theorist Nigel Cross describes how designers rarely begin with clearly defined problems. Instead, they tend to propose tentative solutions—forms, objects, or structures—which then reshape their understanding of the problem itself.
Seen through this lens, the prototype is not an answer, but a method of inquiry. A way of thinking through making.
The risk of too much openness
There is, however, a limit.
Leaving too much unresolved can shift from openness to exclusion. From curiosity to frustration.
This is a line I find myself crossing. The cracks can become holes.
Through practice, I have begun to understand this balance more precisely—how to position the unfinished, how to define its extent.
Not to eliminate uncertainty, but to give it form.
Toward a material discussion of the future
To see the prototype as a materialized question is also to see it as a way of engaging with the future.
It allows us to construct scenarios—not as fixed visions, but as open propositions. Invitations to consider how things might be.
What kinds of relationships do we want to have with the artifacts around us?
How should they behave?
What roles should they play?
The prototype does not simply represent the future. It participates in shaping it.
It creates expectations. Suggests trajectories. Opens up possibilities.
I continue to return to questions that feel disproportionate in scale—questions about meaning, direction, and the role of design.
They cannot be answered directly. Only approached, incrementally.
The prototype offers one such approach.
Not as a step toward resolution, but as a way of thinking through making.
A way of engaging with what is not yet known.