Prototyping and Birthing

A meditation on natality and risk from Sara Hendren

I’d like to start regularly sharing a short-ish recommended weekend read for discussion. This one is from Sara Hendren’s

undefended / undefeated

. I love Sara’s work on disability and design, especially her book What Can a Body Do? which I reviewed for Plough.

In her recent post “now it springs up!” (read the whole thing) she talks about prototyping with her design students and exposing their creation to the mercilessly honest judgement of fourth graders:

The poetry of prototyping is the vulnerable attempt, the tangible trying. The willingness to venture, knowing it might fail. The investment of commitment to even the most sloppy version of a possible newness. A thing being prototyped is trying to get born, unfolding right there in front of you. And all the conversations around that thing have the quality of willed belief: What if it was half as big? Twice as long? A different shape around its edges? Dozens of questions that are all really just versions of the best and only question in design, at the end of the day: Could it be otherwise?

[…]

Jennifer Banks helped me see that prototyping takes place inside a grander thing: natality, the ongoing creative force of newness that powers the world. In her book, Banks says most of us are lopsided in turning so much of our attention to the universality of death. We should and do reckon with mortality, mourning the many endings all around us. But we let death obscure the counterpart universality of birth, of natality. Birth “has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor,” she writes. She means human birth itself, yes, but also the small-b births that form a pattern of everyday newnesses, the dying and rising that shapes our nights and days and seasons.

Kafka announced to us long ago that the meaning of life is that it stops. True enough. But Banks walks the reader alongside seven intellectuals who took seriously the bookend of starting: new life, fecundity and generativity — and, in my mind, our many distributed practices of creative midwifery that get new ideas off the ground. Hannah Arendt is one of Banks’s chief companions on natality. She thought our creative beginnings are not just universal but necessary, a strong stance against authoritarianism, a rebuke to brute force power. Natality, for Arendt, embodies the amor mundi, an outwardness and expectation of beginnings, of making room for others. She called it “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal ‘natural’ ruin.” And the amor mundi has to start somewhere. Not just the endless talking about what the world should be like. Prototyping is beautifully restless and insistent: Show me how. Let’s start.

Taking the risk of starting something, of embracing uncertainty and believing you’ll iterate and adapt has been a theme of some of my recent writing, from the case for having kids early to the benefits of bubbles.

I love the way Sara links this appetite for risk and exposure to natality (and makes it clear how people can participate in this embrace of the world long before and long after they are of childbearing age.

As a parent to a very rules-oriented five year old, I’m trying to actively encourage moments of experimentation and failure and beginning again (without as much anguished “No, I will CRUMPLE IT UP!” at the first stray mark).

For me, my most common prototyping at present falls into a few categories:

• cooking without a recipe

• organizing an essay or talk

• trying to overhaul bedtime or morning routines

Growing up, I only did so much physical world prototyping. It was most often working on crafts (embroidery, inkle loom weaving, sculpey clay) but not necessarily tool building or problem solving as directly.

I got most of my “try, fail, adjust” training in mathletes and computer science, where it’s common to take a first run at a problem and find you have to double back and start again. It’s not as common a practice in actual math classes, alas.

What’s the last prototype you built (physical or not) in a curious, playful spirit?

Where (if anywhere) did you get a formative training in iterating and exposing your solutions to testing?

What’s something you tried that failed recently?