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.

From free software to crowd-sourced entrepreneurial or political initiatives, or open-source projects in science, the status of knowledge in contemporary society is undergoing profound changes. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

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