The Prototyping Mind: Rethinking Perception,Affordances, and the Mediation of Cultural Artifacts

This article focuses on a prototyping session during which 6 Zimbabwean medical professionals design a prosthetic device. Prototyping helps the team determine which features must be built into the prosthetic, amplifies tensions between team members, and puts on display the kinds of futures they imagine. I use the state of disrepair of the team’s prototyping materials to tease out the distinct layers of perceptual reasoning that are instilled in cultural artifacts. An appreciation of the global flows of cultural artifacts lends complexity to the framework of “affordances” and “mediation” employed in the study and design of tools for learning.