Speculative prototyping, frictions and

counter-participation: A civic intervention

with homeless individuals
Mart
ın Tironi, Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de Chile, School of Design, El
Comendador 1916, Providencia, Santiago de Chile

This article reflects on the possibilities that speculative prototyping offers for
rethinking forms of participatory design, generating spaces of friction and
counter-participation. Based on a case of urban hacking conducted with
homeless people in Santiago de Chile, the study deploys a critique of our current
understanding of Smart urbanism, which is focused on aseptic and universal
solutions. We describe the capacities of speculative prototyping to go beyond the
logic of ‘solutionism’ present in the Smart City narrative and in some PD
strategies, precipitating forms of participation-in-prototyping based on
differences and dissensus. Specifically, we argue that the permeability of
prototyping can evoke forms of counter-participation in which frictions are not
limited under the concept of consensus, but rather used in an inventive manner to
explore the issues at hand, inviting to reimagine the notion of participation
trough prototyping.
Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: participatory design, prototypes, urban design, user participation,

speculative intervention

I
n recent years the notion of participatory design (PD) has become a cata-
lyst for different smart experiences and a kind of requirement for
providing such urban interventions with social legitimacy. Given the
expansion of the use of new smart sensors and practices of participatory
sensing (Goodchild, 2007; Goldsmith & Crawford, 2014) users increasingly
conceive of themselves as active agents in the generation of smart solutions
(Laurent & Tironi, 2015). Under this concept of smart urbanism, citizens
are conceived of as data sets, that are operational for the production of solu-
tions regarding the needs of the contemporary city. In this technocratic ‘sol-
utionism’ (Morozov, 2013), urban problems are always susceptible to being
treated as technical problems and the use of PD methods usually takes place
in controlled environments in order to validate certain technological or social
tests with various stakeholders (Marres, 2018).

Corresponding author: This article presents an analysis of an alternative way of addressing urban
Martin Tironi participation and the notion of solutions based on the speculative and partic-
martin.tironi@uc.cl ipatory capacities of prototyping. In order to do this, we analyze a
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Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Tironi, M., Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation: A civic inter-
vention with homeless individuals, Design Studies (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.003
 speculative intervention developed in 2015 in the context of the Urban Hack-
ing workshop offered by the Pontificia Universidad Cat
olica de Chile School
of Design. The case will show how the ‘problem solving’ logic moved to-
wards a design open to forms of problem making, instituting inventive
ways of exploring and eliciting urban issues. In other words, instead of mak-
ing the differences and frictions of urban space invisible -according to the
logic of standard solutions for all contexts- speculative prototyping amplifies
these differences, recognising that situations of friction provide opportunities
to innovate. In dialogue with recent perspectives on speculative research and
participatory urbanism, we will discuss the capacity of prototyping to move
beyond the logic of ‘solutionism’ present in the Smart City narrative and in
some PD strategies, articulating forms of participation and solutions based
on differences and frictions.

This article seeks to contribute to the discussion of participatory design,

focusing on the ability of the prototyping process to unfold differences and
articulate matters of concern. Instead of understanding participatory design
as a method in which the modes of involvement and the issues to be discussed
are determined ex-ante, we will argue that participation emerges when pro-
cesses of ‘counter-participation’ are activated. These are situations in which
participants appropriate and are emancipated from the arrangements defined
by the experts, redistributing what the philosopher Ranciere calls the ‘partition
of the sensible’ (2000) where the sensible is partitioned into various regimes
and delimits forms of inclusion and exclusion in a community. It will show,
thinking with Ranciere, that the moment of participation emerges when the
partition of what can be sensed, represented and perceived, is altered by mo-
ments of ‘counter-participation’ that irrupt in front of the protocols and cat-
egorizations defined ‘from above’. Specifically, we will show how the
prototyping process can precipitate spaces of participation that are open to
frictions, allowing us to problematize the partition of sensible that undertake
the PD methods. Thus, in opposition to the linear and standardized under-
standing of the idea of solution and participation that dominates smart initia-
tives in which solutions are conceived as non-problematic operations, this
article emphasizes the speculative potential of prototyping to elicit issues
and make the critical competencies of the participant’s tangible. We will
describe how speculative practices generate particular scenarios of citizen
involvement, revealing modes of activation in which the modes of making
the city are redesigned based on the frictions involved in the process of
prototyping.

Through this speculative approach to participatory design, we seek to prob-

lematize certain notions of the city and solutions that drive the Smart City
agenda while challenging certain approaches to PD that eliminate frictions
in pursuit of consensus (Keshavarz & Maz
e, 2013). We believe that in highly
unequal contexts such as those that exist in the Global South, it is necessary to

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 go beyond solutions from the North that are excessively purified and univer-
salist and to seriously address the differences and overflows that exists in the
territory. For this challenge, we believe that a speculative approach to partic-
ipatory design can be an embedded and situated mode of inquiry (DiSalvo,
2016; Lury & Wakeford, 2012), or a ‘what-if’ catalyst (Michael, 2012;
Wilkie, Savransky, & Rosengarten, 2017) for re-imagining forms of citizen
participation that consider them a resource for the development of inventive
methods instead of pre-defining or subjecting differences to the notion of
consensus.

1 Opening up forms of building the city

The Smart City narrative is largely the socio-technical operationalization of a
solution-oriented and technocratic ideal in which the problems of contempo-
rary cities will be solved using sensors and computer algorithms that can auto-
mate the identification of problems and planning in decision-making processes
(Batty, 2013). Critiques of the smart imaginary focus on its inability to recog-
nize the singularities and complexities of the urban space (Perng & Kitchin,
2018). Such projects tend to impose what would be a ‘smart solution’ as
opposed to what is considered an ‘idiotic’ solution which exceeds the estab-
lished parameters (Gabrys, 2016; Tironi & Valderrama, 2018). This literature
discusses the dominant premise in smart urbanism of the existence of a linear
relationship between problems and solutions that ignores the complexity and
heterogeneity of components that are deployed in the urban space. Teleolog-
ical notions of design dominate the Smart City narrative, which are meant for
encryptions or for nudging certain ideals and regimes of action, operating as
an architect of politico-moral projects on urban spaces (Dom
ınguez Rubio
& Fogu
e, 2015).

In contrast to the transformations associated with the smart, the rigid nature
of planning and solution design has been questioned over the past few years
based on the need to reconsider the conditions for an open citizen urbanism
that makes the right to self-production and management of infrastructures
tangible (Boano & Talocci, 2014; Cors
ın Jim
enez, 2014; Forlano & Mathew,
2014). Although various terms can be used to refer to these emerging practices
-open code urbanism, do it yourself urbanism, participatory urbanism, tactical
urbanism, P2P urbanism, prototype urbanism, etc.-, the common denomina-
tor is that these are experiences in which citizens intervene socially and mate-
rially in the configuration of their own environment.

This position views citizens as connected to the urban landscape not only as
users or consumers, but as participants who participate in the design, mainte-
nance and signification of the city (Cors
ın Jim
enez & Estalella, 2013). There
thus emerges a growing interest in understanding acts of appropriation of ur-
ban knowledge by profane audiences, generating open forms of intelligence

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 and liberation of the established forms of knowledge of the city. This ‘new
economy of open knowledge’ (Cors
ın Jim
enez, 2014; 344) would lead to a chal-
lenging of the conventional separation between the expert and the profane,
consumer and producer, private and pro-common, political and sub-
political. It is an invitation to recognize the right to infrastructure as a verb
and not a noun, the process of ‘infrastructuring’ not as a starting point, but
as the result of an ecology of elements (human and non-human) in a perma-
nent state of be-coming and generating new possibilities (Cors
ın Jim
enez,
2014: 354).

In regard to the idea that cities are getting ‘smarter,’ Dom
ınguez Rubio and
Fogu
e (2013) argue that there is a need to open up the issue of infrastructure
to public debate, not only offering a new understanding of urban space but
also advancing the possibility of new forms of civic participation and engage-
ment (1039). In contrast to the dominant process of smart interventions to-
wards the “technification of the public space” in which black-boxing
operations limit opportunities for participation and citizen awareness of urban
spaces (Forlano & Mathew, 2014), Dom
ınguez Rubio & Fogu
e argue that
there is a need to think about mechanisms that allow for the publicization
of infrastructure, that is, to subject infrastructure to public scrutiny, discussion
and accountability (1040). Likewise, and in a dialogue with approaches that
challenge the anthropocentric concept of public conformation (Marres, 2012
Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013), Dom
ınguez Rubio & Fogu
e invite us to rethink in-
frastructures from their ontological heterogeneity. Using a similar approach,
Boano and Kelling (2013) mobilize the notion of the “architecture of
dissensus,” suggesting that design can play a role in generating spaces for crit-
icism and reflection towards different urban possibilities, configuring new sce-
narios of involvement with the city.

Although the strategy of citizen participation has become increasingly mobi-

lized within the Smart City rhetoric (Tironi & Valderrama, 2018) and open ur-
banization movements are increasingly being valued by local governments
(Douglas, 2014; Finn, 2014), it is still a challenge to go beyond the purely play-
ful nature of participatory interventions in the city. In this respect, Finn (2014)
suggests that open or DIY urbanism constitute a light and inexpensive way of
making the city in contrast to bureaucratic and inflexible planning, deploying
playful (not necessarily functional) and temporary (not necessarily definitive)
creative solutions. Though Finn recognizes the creativity of the open move-
ment and its importance for promoting a participatory urban social fabric,
he warns that the innovative aura of these projects does not always ensure
that they will lead to urban changes.

In this regard, it is essential to experiment with forms of urban intervention

that facilitate the hybridization of expertise and an opening up of the condi-
tions for citizen participation in which the meaning of participation is

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 negotiated and enacted by the audiences themselves (Binder, Brandt, Ehn, &
Halse, 2015). One of the elements that will be analyzed in this article is the ex-
istence of urban intervention repertoires that are not limited to “representing”
the interests of citizens or pre-determining solutions, but which allow for an
emergent and critical redefinition of the positions and rules at play.

1.1 Participation, speculative prototyping and frictions

While prototypes have become especially interesting in the Smart City agenda
and in the world of innovation and entrepreneurship, the political and specu-
lative operations that prototypes deploy have received little attention. Over the
past few years, however, several research projects situated at the intersection of
participatory design and Science and Technologies Studies (STS) have ad-
dressed this lack.

Taking into account several precepts regarding how materialities, settings and
environments can allow certain issues and citizens to be placed together
(Latour & Weibel, 2005; Lezaun and Marres 2011; Marres 2012), recent
research has emphasized the experimental qualities of prototyping and their
capacity to generate emerging processes of involvement and co-design. One
of the common goals of such research is to stop seeing PD as a technique
aimed at stabilizing a solution or the qualities of a product and to view it as
an open process that allows issues of interest to be elicited. In this process
of activating the emergence of issues -instead of pre-defining them or taking
them for granted- prototyping plays a fundamental role as an experimental
space in which to engage with possible worlds and the speculative figure of
what-if.

It is important to underscore a distinction between the prototype as object and

product and prototyping as a performative activity. When analyzing the dy-
namics of social innovation through design, Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson
(2011), conceive of the process of prototyping as “thinging,” that is, not
only as a thing (an object) but as a socio-material relationship in which issues
can be dealt with. They argue that prototyping can become an inventive and
agnostic space, “allowing controversies to exist side by side, instead of negoti-
ating them through consensus”. This approach involves moving towards more
experimental modes of ‘drawing things together,’ considering the entangle-
ment and assemblage between humans and non-human agencies. From a
similar perspective, DiSalvo (2014) suggests that prototyping, understood as
a process of ‘critical making,’ constitutes a space in which to generate collab-
orative practices of exchange, inquiry and elucidation of the conditions for
participation in design. Furthermore, Binder and his collaborators (2015)
argue that the emphasis on prototype-(ing) not only implies a greater critical
involvement of individuals, but also implies a shift from participation to
appropriation, which raises ethical questions about whether those involved in

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 the co-design process have been rightfully represented (Binder et al., 2015:
158). Cors
ın Jim
enez (2013), reflecting on the role of the prototype for
rethinking the urban condition, highlights a political vocation associated
with its experimental and recursive nature. He says that the urban inhabited
as a prototype is a language of reference for a new techno-political awareness
of professions, skills and communal self-organization. The experimental and
open qualities of prototypes have become a new substrate for recent experi-
ences and processes of cultural democratization.

Inspired by the work of Isabelle Stengers (2005), Michael (2012) analyzes inven-
tive and speculative events provoked by prototypes. The author shows how
these test devices not only introduce forms of exploration that are open to mul-
tiple types of rationality, but also produce a productive idiocy, expanding the
range of the possible and reconfiguring the parameters of the issues. The event
of prototyping offers an opportunity to slow down (Stengers, 2005) the pro-
cesses, generating what Michael calls ‘inventive problem making’, activating
more provocative and ambiguous questions (Wilkie, Michael, & Plummer-
Fernandez, 2015). In other words, the figure of the idiot elicited in the process
of prototyping not only allows for the re-problematizing of what is taken for
granted, but also opens the possibility of engaging with open-endedness and
recalcitrance of the social world (Lury & Wakeford, 2012).

This speculative vocation of the prototyping process is central to our case

study, as we will show how the figures of what-if mobilized by civic interven-
tion in the neighborhood of La Chimba allow for frictions and issues of inter-
est to be evoked, transforming dissent into an inventive strategy for
involvement and participation.

Emphasizing this permeable condition of the speculative prototype, some au-

thors advocate using the prototypes’ capacities for ontological and cosmopo-
litical inquiry (Stengers, 2005), allowing for the deployment of future scenarios
in order to constitute a co-habited cosmos (J€ onsson & Lenskjold, 2017;
Lenskjold & Olander, 2016; Tironi & Hermansen, 2018). Given the mallea-
bility of the prototype, this propitiates an ecology of attention and care over
multiple modes of existence. As such, prototyping with non-human entities al-
lows us to glimpse spaces of correspondence, in which beings respond to one
another in a gesture of care and attentionality rather than intentionality
(Ingold, 2017). Prototyping refrains from engaging in pretensions of universal-
ity and instead claims procedural, speculative and situated action, becoming a
sensible way of entering into correspondence with the singularities of the
agencies in play.

Drawing on the concept of ‘agonistic pluralism,’ DiSalvo (2012) emphasize the

speculative and adversarial dimension of design interventions. That is, instead
of seeking out the generation of entirely transparent and familiar objects that

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 are available for a specific solution, the idea would be to think about design as
a place of reflection and prospective confrontation through objects, material-
ities and experiences that challenge consensus that are taken as a given. In
other words, instead of placing the focus on the search for advanced or closed
solutions, design is posited as a place in which to proliferate dissensus and
ontological differences, allowing us to critically re-think the ways in which
we invite others to participate (Keshavarz & Maz
e, 2013; Lindstr€ om &
Stahl, 2015).

Following the theoretical line of those works, our approach does not involve
using participatory design to produce compatible-modes-of-participation un-
der the hypothetical assumption that participation can be entirely pro-
grammed (Marres, 2018). Following Ranciere (2000), we believe it is
fundamental to explore and teste mechanisms of urban participation that
welcome differences and frictions, thus allowing for the redistribution of part-
age du sensible. For Ranciere, the ‘partition of sensible’ refers to an ontological
policy that defines modes of participation, what is visible and thinkable, what
can be speakable and unspeakable. In contemporary society, this ‘partition of
sensible’ is divided between those who can determine what can be perceived
and other excluded parties (2000: 12). This arbitrariness not only entails sep-
aration between the disadvantaged individuals and those with the capacity to
decide for others (legitimate and illegitimate persons), but also forces arbitrary
forms of democratic consensus, which performs a prior identification of inter-
ests, assuming and projecting the hopes of the people.

One of the challenges that Ranciere suggests, and that we will seek to explore
through our speculative intervention, involves generating the conditions for a
political practice that is carried out on the basis of the frictions, disruptions
and differences of the participants involved. That is, instead of imposing
what can be represented and perceived (assigning persons’ static positions),
or prefiguring solutions out of context, the process should propitiate possibil-
ities -always contingent and ephemeral- so that those who are ‘excluded’ can
emancipate themselves from the conditions imposed by others. It is not a ques-
tion of creating mechanisms to include the excluded (as several PD methods
do) but rather for Ranciere the political is detonated when those orders,
defined from above, are stressed, interrupted and re-invented. This implies a
re-articulation of the ‘partition of sensible’, that is, a shift towards dissensus
or forms of counter-participation, questioning the ‘ontological politics’ behind
the processes of participation in terms of design (Keshavarz & Maz
e, 2013).
Speculative design processes play a fundamental role in this effort of testing
new conditions for politics of participation, as they can facilitate the emer-
gence of political moments that go beyond the idea of consensus, recognizing
in such frictions and disruptions a mode of exploration. We can understand
frictions, as did Tsing (2011), as uncomfortable, unequal and unstable quali-
ties that can ‘make worlds’ and generate inventive forms of interaction.

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 The political as a moment of friction requires speculation over inventive forms
of intervention, expanding the materials that constitute politics and participa-
tion. In this sense, we consider beneficial the notion of ‘speculative interven-
tion’ recently proposed by DiSalvo (2016: 140): a mode of inquiry developed
through design, but not necessarily done for design or for problem solving.

In the civic intervention that we analyze in the following pages, we shall

examine the capacity of prototyping to activate forms of participation that
are open to friction, enacting forms of engagement with the urban space that
escape the attempts of prediction and enrollment of experts. Speculative proto-
typing can become a mode of inquiry and exploratory knowledge, testing and
making manifest the multiple entanglement and frictions that shape the prob-
lems of the city. We focus on how intervening in an urban problem through
speculative intervention makes possible and activates the critical and emanci-
patory skills that individuals have at their disposal (Boltanski & Th
evenot,
1991), allowing them to become visualizers of their own problems and hopes.

2 Case study. La Chimba

Following a series of theoretical and practical exercises oriented towards
working with students on the archaeology, malleability and intelligence of ob-
jects and prototypes in the urban space, the Urban Hacking workshop entered
into a phase of project definition. That is, each group was to outline the space
of hacking around which the work would be articulated. The workshop chose
the La Chimba neighborhood as the space of exploration for these projects.
Located in northern Santiago between the Mapocho River and Cerro Blanco,
this traditional neighborhood has always been considered the capital city’s
‘backroom,’ composed of the ‘invisible’ layers of the foundational city
(M
arquez & Truffello, 2013). As such, people associated this outlying area
with that ‘accursed section’ that all societies have (Bataille, 1987). In this
case, the area’s inhabitants are thought to be vagabonds, immigrants, riffraff
and ‘poorly engaged people. whose existence will contribute to La Chimba’s
image as the land of disorder and barbarism’ (M
arquez & Truffello, 2013; our
translation). While the representation of La Chimba has changed and it is now
recognized as home to some of the capital’s key historic landmarks (farmers
markets, the city cemetery, working class neighborhoods, a small 16th century
church, etc.), it is a microcosm of the variety of stakeholders and urban fric-
tions linked to immigration and gentrification, the informal economy and so-
cial integration, and many other issues.

2.1 Exploring frictions: the assumption of continuity between

expert and practical knowledge
The students’ first task was to engage in ‘ethnographic immersion in order to
identify the frictions present in La Chimba.’ They faced the challenge of taking
apart the model of the expert who identifies a need and then proposes a

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 solution. The goal was for them to place themselves on the side of the subjects
and their practical knowledge, allowing themselves to be affected by the criti-
cisms and frictions that the actors themselves mobilize, following the proposal
offered by Boltanski and Th
evenot (1991). The authors’ pragmatic hypothesis
-which the workshop sought to incorporate through this observation work- is
that in a society the critical capacity has become a constant in the management
of social life. Thus, the analytical focus is the capacities and instruments that
the individuals develop in order to elaborate critical resources that they deploy
over the course of their daily lives (Boltanski & Th
evenot, 1991). According to
this method, one of the tasks of the researcher, in this case the designer, is to
recognize and work with those who have such critical capacity, using a norma-
tive approach to the nature of the solutions used.

In this way, and adopting a strong ethnographic approach, the definition of

the frictions focused on witnessing the situations and problems that people
manifest, seeking to display forms of empathy with situations instead of de-
ploying a solution-oriented approach. Rather than juxtaposing external vari-
ables and stabilized conflicts and labeling the people and situations observed,
the teams focused on accompanying and following in the footsteps of the sub-
jects, exploring the ways in which the actors inhabit and translate tensions.
The teams had to adopt a position of correspondence, accompanying and con-
tinuity (Boltanski & Th
evenot, 1991; Ingold, 2017) rather than exteriority or
epistemological rupture regarding the situation or tension identified. This
required humility and recognition of the types of evidence (symbolic, material,
discursive, urban, sociological, etc.) that underlie and continually co-produce
the frictions.

This sensitivity was what we sought to put into practice in the civic interven-
tions of the teams in order to explore alternative ways of addressing urban
participation and problems. It is important to note that this view, which is sen-
sitive to the frictions and critical capacities of individuals, was included in a
critical discussion of the idea of ‘smart solutions’, which tends to remove the
recalcitrances and singularities that local contexts present. With this goal in
mind, the workshop encouraged participants to use prototyping to generate
spaces of becoming-with, drawing on flexibility and the ethos of care that mo-
bilizes the prototype to speculate on open ways to intervene in the differences
and frictions.

2.2 ‘Outdoor rooms,’ or making profane urbanism visible

The Urban Hacking project analyzed below identified individuals without a
fixed domicile who do not live in regular homes. ‘We focused on the large num-
ber of homeless people who live in the neighborhood’ (Hojman, Guevara, &
Garc
ıa de la Huerta, 2015). The team gathered information about the subjects,
how people view them, why they have chosen to live this way and the effects of

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 their presence on the urban landscape. During the two months of information
gathering and development of the intervention, the group identified the area in
which the project would be implemented and conducted regular visits to it, do-
ing interviews, observations and visual record. The group had to be able to win
the trust of the homeless at least initially in order to ensure that the designers
would not be considered a threat. This process of establishing trust was not
free from friction and confrontation. But as we will try to show, the relation-
ship between designers and the homeless was never something guaranteed or
considered as a starting point of the process. Rather, this relationship was
the tenuous result of the prototyping process through which they were eluci-
dating issues and modes of correspondence between the actors involved.

Three findings initially define the nature of the intervention. The first is the
strong familiarity that these individuals develop within their social environ-
ment. This means that -despite being labeled as marginalized or excluded peo-
ple- they tend to carry out functional roles in the place in which they live,
becoming an integral part of the neighborhood ecosystem. They participate
in daily dynamics, generating intimate connections with merchants, passersby,
stray dogs, urban real estate and other actors.

The second finding has to do with their biographic heterogeneity. They do not
share a single profile or follow any one pattern, but rather represent a diversity
of life stories that makes it impossible to fit them into a single category (‘alco-
holics,’ ‘mentally ill,’ ‘lawless,’ etc.). The team recognized a multiplicity of life-
styles and justifications for their decision to be ‘homeless,’ different ways of
facing life without a permanent address, and diverse biographies that range
‘from teachers to the illiterate’ (Hojman et al., 2015).

The third and most important finding that defined the nature of the students’
intervention is the capacity of these subjects to appropriate and profane spaces
designed to be public on a temporary and ever-changing basis through a wide
range of actions, DIY tricks and urban wreckage. The team described this
finding as follows: ‘We were very interested in their appropriation of spaces,
sidewalks and walls. We wanted to explore how they create outside rooms
based on a strategic combination of the elements that they were able to find
in the streets. They are the most authentic urban hackers’ (Hojman et al., 2015).

Following this path blazed by De Certeau (1980) around the creative capacity
of daily practices, the team decided to call their project ‘Outside Rooms.’ The
idea was to show how these subjects generate activities that are considered to
be intimate (sleeping, eating, lazing around, drinking, getting dressed, etc.) in
the public space of La Chimba, violating the public/private border and
evoking an intermediate or border space that combines the qualities of a
shared space with those of intimate ones. Through the different actions and ac-
tivities that they carry out -marking walls and surfaces, recovering objects,

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 designing tables and beds, redefining the spaces symbolically and materially-,
these people transform the space, testing and prototyping new possibilities,
giving meanings of ‘domestic inhabitability’ to corners and places projected
as simple transit spaces.

Recognizing the possible, temporary and fluid nature of the practices and ma-
terialities that the subjects used, the designers developed an interest in
combining the socio-material repertoires used to compose and designate their
spaces of residence. The team sought to explore how these practices demon-
strated an inconsistency between that which is scheduled or set and the real
uses of certain spaces, between the projected spaces and the ways in which
they performed them. In other words, the homeless people engaged in a pro-
fane way of engaging in urban design1 that was much more open and ephem-
eral than conventional methods. This was a challenge for the team of designers
when they had to come up with strategies for intervention that would be
appropriate for that transitional way of making and inhabiting the city.

2.3 First prototype: visualizing others’ rooms

The team decided to deploy its first speculative prototype based on these find-
ings. They sought ‘to unveil the invisible layer of the city that presents its own
rituals and ways of acting and relating’ (Hojman et al., 2015). The goal was to
lay bare the creativity of the practices developed by homeless people and to
amplify their presence in the urban space through the redesign and prolonga-
tion of their activities in the territory. The hypothesis was that the intervention
would be a sort of ‘space hacking and collaboration’ to the extent that the
deployment of the designers’ knowledge would contribute to revealing the flex-
ibility of the urban ecology and, with it, the disconnects between the planned
and real use of the space. If homeless people are ‘urban hackers’ in order to
survive and by choice, thus redefining the functionalities of certain public
spaces in La Chimba, the designers would use their intervention to expand
these operations and make them even more visible through the tracing of those
interior spaces (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 A homeless person engaging in his ‘interior habits.’

Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation 11

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vention with homeless individuals, Design Studies (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.003
 With this goal in mind, the designers identified and typified different spaces
inhabited by the homeless. Using colored masking tape, they then proto-
typed the visualizations on walls and floors in order to help outline the ac-
tivities that were considered to be ‘interior.’ Like Lars von Trier’s 2003 film
Dogville, in which the narration unfolds in a space marked with white
chalk, the designers marked different practices (cooking, sleeping), objects
(furniture, artifacts) and spaces (kitchen, bedroom, dining room), thus
intensifying the residents’ decontextualizing and undoing of the borders be-
tween public and private. As the sequence of images below (Figure 2)
shows, the projections on the spaces inhabited by the homeless became
an artistic operation led by the designers that sought to testify to the pres-
ence of ‘outdoor rooms.’

2.4 Design as a space of frictions

A few days after the students conducted the intervention, the supposed sub-
jects of the design action sabotaged it. They removed the entire scene in an
act that we could consider the defense of ‘private property.’ They said,
‘This doesn’t represent me.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Get out of here!’ ‘Go
do your thing somewhere else.’ ‘Go play somewhere else- these answers are
useless to us.’ The inhabitants of these marked spaces felt that the students
had violated and transgressed their intimacy. They mainly saw these marks
on the walls as a form of imposition of knowledge and representation. While
the designers had achieved a certain level of proximity and empathy to the
people who inhabited these spaces, this was not enough to keep the residents
from seeing the prototyping as a use and manipulation of their lives. The vi-
suals on the walls showed imaginaries thought of by others (the designers),
that is, a form of representation that did not stand outside of the expert/
non-expert asymmetry. The formats of collaboration inscribed in this first
prototype maintained a top-down logic that asked users to be nothing
more than verifiers. Instead of observing a space of identification in the inter-
vention, this prototype precipitated an ontological clash between the parties,
thus making evident the frictions that underlie the territory. Following
Ranciere (2000), the form of participation proposed in this prototype
assumed the capacity to determine the needs and positions of the others

Figure 2 Designer outlining a bedroom, bedside table, bed and lamp in La Chimba.

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 instead of promoting a redistribution of the issues in dispute or a form of
participation in which the others are not perceived as simple receptors.

However, the designers’ efforts to capture the needs of their ‘users’ through the
intervention ended up becoming a friction space by laying bare the residual
participation of those involved under a regime of representation that did not
belong to them. A design that was originally conceived of as a tool for empa-
thizing with others’ lives became an agonistic design that generated dissensus
and conflicts (DiSalvo, 2012; Forlano & Mathew, 2014), making a topic of and
problematizing the welfare-oriented tendency that the project had adopted. In
other words, prototyping allowed for a critical revision of the framing or
‘ontological policy’ (Mol, 1999) behind the first intervention, revealing the
appearance of agonisms and singularities not considered in the first instance.

If the team of designers had managed to convince themselves that they were
conducting a project centered on the homeless during their observations and
conversations, the response to the prototype (it was rendered inoperative)
showed that ‘speaking for others’ (Ranciere, 2000) is an ethical matter that
the design project did not completely address. The resistance that the first
prototypes inspired allowed them to recognize that their ‘audience’ could
not be treated like ‘validating users,’ as mere spectators of an experience
based on ideas, inputs and insights based on their lifestyles. This led several
of the inhabitants of the hacked spaces to criticize and question the very na-
ture of the intervention, forcing the redefinition of the protocol of participa-
tion and scope of the speculative intervention and the role that they would
play in the experience.

The prototyping process thus acquired a specific political tonality. It created

material and symbolic frictions and dissensus derived from an effort to objec-
tify and represent others’ lives without fully engaging in a redistribution of
the forms of agency and participation at play. On the contrary, it reproduced
the border between the world of the designers and that of the non-designers,
between those who claim to have solutions and those who do not. The inter-
vention thus generated an unexpected effect that differed from the friendly
user-centered design, producing frictions and critical involvement regarding
what the prototype represented. In spite of the intentions, the project became
an experience of counter-participation, that is, it allowed for the emergence
of frictions and critical competencies of certain actors and led the designers
to reexamine the modes of participation and redistribution of forms of
knowledge in dispute. To put it another way, the productive nature of the
prototyping process did not align with the agreements reached, differences
managed or solutions introduced. Rather, this came from the possibility of
fueling differences and disagreements, widening ambiguous ethical and the
politics at play, and providing the resources necessary to question the forms
of representation proposed. The permeability of prototyping allowed for re-

Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation 13

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 designed scenarios based on dissent and friction, strengthening the creation
of new scenarios of involvement.

In short, this first prototype introduced a situation of legitimate objection,

providing spaces for forms of exploration and knowledge, making explicit
and problematizing the project’s conditions. In line with the ‘speculative
intervention’ developed by DiSalvo (2016), this first intervention was trans-
formed into a mechanism of inquiry and an unfolded matter of concern,
introducing questions about how the homeless were being enacted and
summoned.

2.5 Rewriting and redesigning their own stories

When designing the second prototype, the group engaged in the following
analysis: ‘It did not take long for us to realize that intervention did not
make sense if we did not include the vision and voice of its protagonists’
(Hojman et al., 2015). The first prototype had laid bare an effort focused on
aid and literacy (Callon, 1999) by taking the inhabitants of those spaces as
agents that can only provide opinions or complement the designers’ decisions.
Now the project included the participants’ voice not to evaluate the relevance
of its projections, but as a constitutive element of the creative process itself.
The effort consisted of moving from a design for, to a design with, trying to
deploy the creative resources of the people involved (See Figures. 3e5).

The group returned to the site to figure out what the second prototype would
look like, but now with a more open attitude and guided more by uncertainty
than by certainties regarding their knowledge. Instead of marking the spaces,
they decided to explore the meanings, experiences and histories that the sub-
jects mobilized, letting themselves be informed (or designed) by the homeless
themselves. The idea for the second prototype emerged from this process to
welcome the responses of these groups of people. This new intervention would
allow the inhabitants of the spaces to design, present and visualize their ways
of life.

Figure 3 The new designers of the ‘Outdoor Rooms’ project.

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Figure 4 Designing own vision of the world. The legend proclaims, ‘This is my [house].’

Figure 5 Antony seated below his work.

The result was an open and speculative re-design process executed by the res-
idents of the spaces. This generated a space of discussion and reflection among
all of those involved with the experience, allowing them to speak freely about
the implications of living on the streets, of their desires and challenges, of vi-
sions of society and freedom, and many other issues that were identified and
then projected. A resident named Guillermo said that ‘living on the streets
means being completely free’ (Hojman et al., 2015). Alejandro and John
took the opportunity to talk about how they ‘rotate between places and friends
to drink their bottle of rum.’ The speculative prototype thus became a device
for exploring and representing their lives, thus postponing any uncertainty
about their ways of being in the city.

This second prototype allowed for a form of involvement, knowledge and rep-
resentation that was more anchored in lived experiences. As the group noted,
‘The marks on the walls did not just announce the presence of the people who
inhabit those spaces. They displayed their experiences, interests, desires and
fantasies on those walls. They became street artists conveying their message’
(Hojman et al., 2015). This intervention thus made a form of correspondence
tangible in ‘which beings or things literally answer one another over time’
(Ingold, 2017: 14).

Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation 15

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 2.6 The politics of intimacy
The transfer of responsibility from designers to those affected evoked much
more complete narratives and scenarios than those the designers produced.
We could say that this new form of intervention led by the homeless al-
lowed for the materialization of ‘counterfactual scripting,’ that is, narra-
tives that challenge the top-down and teleological character of
participation in design (Huybrechts, Hendriks, & Martens, 2017). In effect,
prototyping not only achieved greater involvement of people, but also acti-
vated what may be called a politics of intimacy, in that those affected by
homelessness showed what ‘interior,’ ‘intimacy’ and ‘home’ meant to
them in a space projected for public use. For example, through this experi-
ence, Antony developed a narrative of his most intimate route and the as-
pects that he would like to have developed so that the execution of that
intimacy could be fuller. After composing and designing the figure of a
home, Antony, like an architect looking at his work, explained: ‘This is
my house. This is the table and three chairs. There is a bench to sit on in
the patio. That is how I imagine it.’

Antony’s design is a canonical model of a house. However, through this

composition he radicalizes the political operation that mobilizes these indi-
viduals: he claims the right to a city that is lived intimately (‘I feel that
this space is my home’), but in a territory planned to be inhabited as a public
space. Antony explains that he does not only engage in activities that could
be carried out at home (eating, sleeping, getting dressed, etc.) in this space,
but also says that ‘the doors to his home are open to anyone he knows who
is passing by.’

The projective materiality and malleability that the new prototype evoked al-
lowed the inhabitants of that corner of La Chimba to explain and appro-
priate their own narratives and concerns, making the design and its
political qualities a space of, for and by anyone (S
anchez-Criado,
Rodr
ıguez-Giralt, & Mencaroni, 2015). This second prototype also called
into question the idea of the design of authorship conceived of by urban
hacking professionals, allowing it to be interpolated by the critical and coun-
terfactual narrative competencies formulated by the subjects themselves. The
speculative intervention puts those who were supposedly not familiar with
‘narrative design’ and the design students on equal footing. The latter saw
their first prototype hacked and verified that becoming the spokesperson
and translator of others’ ways of life is an aesthetically delicate endeavor.
At the same time, instead of stabilizing forms of participation and deter-
mining solutions, roles and positions, the process of prototyping allowed
for the re-distribution of the competencies at stake and led to questions
about what it means to participate in design processes.

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 3 Conclusion. Speculative prototyping and counter-
participation
The speculative prototyping process analyzed in this article is seen as ‘counter-
participation’ in the sense that the involvement of homeless people in the cen-
ter of the project led to frictions, lack of trust and differences generated by the
first cycle of the prototyping. We could even say that the truly participatory
moment occurred when the homeless were emancipated from the framing pro-
posed by the designers, generating their own counterfactual manifestations
and narratives. For Ranciere (2000), it is precisely the political that emerges
when the ‘partage du sensible’ (which determines what can be said and repre-
sented) is destabilized and questioned, introducing spaces of disagreement.

The Outdoor Rooms civic intervention has certain similarities to what DiSalvo
(2012) calls ‘adversarial design,’ that is, a design that generates things, situa-
tions or moments of confrontation or design, providing the resources needed
to pluralize points of view and allow concerned parties to make explicit differ-
ences and critiques. However, an important difference with the idea of ‘adver-
sarial design’ is that the speculative prototypes that we analyzed here did not
adopt the ‘adversarial’ as a starting point for the intervention. Instead, the fric-
tions and conflicts were the result of the permeability of the process of proto-
typing. In this sense, the project analyzed is inscribed in the idea of speculative
intervention (DiSalvo, 2016), that is, to precipitate possible scenarios and new
forms of knowledge through design. It is a perspective that moves away from
the instrumentalism that uses design to package solutions or pre-set issues, and
instead produces elements with which to speculate about other things and mat-
ters of concern.

The case analyzed shows how the prototyping process generated forms of
participation that arise from the ontological shocks and excesses of the parties
involved. The frictions made it possible to re-negotiate the conditions of
participation, which can be felt, said and represented, forcing us to respect
the differences and recalcitrance of the individuals involved. The deployment
of prototyping processes afforded the participants the opportunity to imple-
ment participation based on frictions, encouraging the deployment of possible
scenarios regarding collaborative design. Thus, the residents ceased to be the
‘object’ of an aesthetic-project treatment and became co-producers of it, as-
signing themselves the right to design their forms of representation and appro-
priation of the city.

This case allows us to examine the ‘politics of representation’ underlying the

PD project and smart solutions agenda. That is, we can consider the extent
to which these supposedly open protocols are actually sensitive to the compo-
sition of differences and frictions, singularities and particular contexts. Many
of the PD protocols mobilized in open innovation projects or to provide smart

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 solutions in the city are informed by universalist and standardized approaches
(Forlano & Mathew, 2014; Perng & Kitchin, 2018) or aimed at identifying the
interests of the ‘stakeholders’ (Bj€
orgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012). In addi-
tion, they tend to drive away and avoid any form of idiotic manifestation,
seeking to consecrate the idea of smart participation or the idea of consensus
(Gabrys, 2016; Tironi & Valderrama, 2018). In other words, these are ‘sum-
moned’ and ‘arranged’ forms of participation, which instead of being
conceived as processes in beta, are always open to becoming-with, seeking
to produce distinctions between what is participation and what is not, between
the idiotic and the smart.

We believe that the speculative intervention that we have analyzed in this

article allows us to contribute to the discussion of the limits of smart solutions
and the political biases that can lead to certain PD framings (Keshavarz &
Maz
e, 2013), presenting possible scenarios in which design can respect the dif-
ferences and frictions in participation processes. Given that the smart spirit
and the universalist interest in generating solutions based on the use of new
technologies are expanding throughout the world’s cities (Greenfield, 2017),
it is necessary to explore forms of intervention in the city that are vulnerable
to differences and singularities, to recalcitrance and multiplicity. Tsing
(2011) has emphasized the need to pay attention to the moment of frictions,
understood as inventive and disruptive moments that allow the production
of situated answers and knowledge. Under this perspective of friction, it seems
fundamental to prototype spaces of encounter permeable to these disruptions
and antagonisms. Rather than prescribing closed solutions, where protocols of
participation are defined ex-ante, we argue that it is essential to explore forms
of intervention vulnerable to indefiniteness, drawing on the care of prototyp-
ing as a resource that allows us to enter into processes of correspondence
(Ingold, 2017) with urban issues.

In closing, we would like to insist on one point: the counter-participation in the

experience analyzed did not occur in a manner that was independent from the
objects and materialities involved in the process of prototyping. The involve-
ment co-emerged with the objects in dispute, which, as dramatic agents, made
the trajectory of the intervention take unexpected and ambiguous turns, dis-
rupting the identity, concerns, form and properties of the participants
involved. The article has shown how a prototype, a temporary speculative
intervention, ends up becoming a mediator for the involvement and deploy-
ment of the critical competencies of the actors involved. The speculative inter-
vention allowed for the ‘murmur of the idiot’, to use Stengers’ expression
(2005), a figure that demands that processes and decisions be slowed down,
requiring a reexamination of unquestioned procedures and consensuses.
Michael (2012) proposes that the force of speculative prototypes, does not
only lie in its capacity to test and probe situations, but is also in its capacity
to operationalize the conduct of the idiot evoked by Stengers. That is, it is a

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 form of ethics that avoids consensus and pre-determined certainty and which
opens itself up to stopping processes, transforming ontological uncertainty
and ambiguity into a resource (Wilkie et al., 2017). In other words, we think
that speculative prototyping forces us to pay attention to the specificity of
other entities and their life worlds, deploying what Tsing calls the ‘art of
noticing’ (2010). In contrast to the smart solution, prototyping captures and
mobilizes the fragility and indetermination of its own action and releases the
identity of the beings it summons.

In this article, we have tried to demonstrate the ways in which speculative pro-
totyping processes can play a crucial role in the reimagining urban life, gener-
ating scenarios of civic intervention that go beyond the logic of the dominant
solutionism. As a process that is sensitive to the agencies of those that interact
with it, prototyping makes it possible to generate spaces for friction and
collaboration that go beyond the exceptionalism of expert knowledge. We
are not offering here a ‘recipe’ for creating counter-participation through
design, instead we believe that through prototyping process it’s possible to un-
fold speculative spaces of critical making, and to provoke new ways of
thinking on the ‘ontological politics’ and assumptions of PD. Urban designs
should not only be evaluated in terms of the ‘intelligent’ solutions that they
provide, but also based on their capacities to crafting new scenarios, forms
of collaboration, knowledge and commitment to the ecology of the city.

Notes
1. The figure of the profane comes from the idea of violating, that is, placing items consid-
ered sacred or separate from the ordinary world on the plane of common use (Agamben,
2005).

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22 Design Studies Vol -- No. -- Month 2018

Please cite this article in press as: Tironi, M., Speculative prototyping, frictions and counter-participation: A civic inter-
vention with homeless individuals, Design Studies (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2018.05.003