This collection examines the different ways in which the prototyping of knowledge inflects and shapes new developments in art, science and politics contexts today. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, Spain. He is the author of An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World (2013) and editor of Culture and Well-being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (2007). His current work examines the development of open-source urban hardware projects by architects, artists and engineers.

Introduction: The prototype: more than many and less than one 1. Prototyping and Contemporary Anthropological Experiments with Ethnographic Method 2. From Prototyping to Allotyping: The invention of change of use and the crisis of building type 3. In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin's Atmospheres 4. Choreographic Objects: Contemporary dance, digital creations and prototyping social visibility 5. Prototyping as Event: Designing the Future of Obesity 6. The Interior Design of [Free] Knowledge