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Prototypes as objects for historians to study can offer some interesting benefits:
1. Historians can interact with prototypes to "re-experience" the constraints of a past era.
2. Modern scholarship — with its user-centered historiography — often emphasizes how technology is "socially constructed.” (I know this might be viewed as a bit dated but it still has many proponents!) Prototypes often show evidence of
early user testing. Wear patterns, modified buttons, or ergonomic adjustments on a prototype tell a story of how early users influenced a technology’s trajectory before it ever reached a factory line.
3. … and, finally, standard histories often suffer from hindsight bias, looking only at successful end products. Prototypes provide a material
trail of the path not taken. By examining a series of failed or intermediate prototypes, historians can reconstruct the developer's logic, seeing exactly where a specific technical theory failed and how the design was "negotiated" with the laws of physics.
Enjoy Hansen’s great blog!
Dag
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