ABSTRACT
Mobile and social technologies have had a dramatic impact on the way we communicate, compressing time and space and enabling novel human interactions around, and through, technology. The promise of hyperconnectivity through an internet of physical and wearable things could further alter the way we interact with each other, with governments, and with corporations. Yet many of these technologies were not designed with this type of communication in mind. They were developed by engineers and scientists at the forefront of material and computational exploration, primarily interested in technical possibility, not human interaction. In communications research there is a tendency to understand new technologies in terms of the way they have changed our social interactions and impacted our culture. Scholars have noted a focus on media texts, industries and audiences as a means of understanding the implications of new platforms. Less attention has been paid to prospective approaches that focus on the creation of new technologies and how they could change communication. This chapter argues that prototyping interaction not only allows us to imagine new forms of communication, but gives insight into the implications of new technologies in use.
