Lucy Suchman, Randall Trigg and Jeanette Blomberg Working artefacts: ethnomethods of the prototype ABSTRACT This paper follows recent science studies in theorizing information technologies as socio-material congurations, aligned into more and less durable forms. The study of how new technologies emerge shifts, on this view, from a focus on inven- tion to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. This view is developed in relation to the case of the ‘prototype’, an explorator y technology designed to effect alignment between the multiple inter- ests and working practices of technology research and development, and sites of technologies-in-use. In so far as it is successful, the prototype works as an exemp- lary artefact that is at once intelligibly familiar to the actors involved, and recog- nizably new. KEYWORDS: Information technologies; science and technology studies; ethnomethodological studies of work; accountability; innovation; research and development Drawing on the somewhat unlikely pairing of the writings of Niels Bohr and Michel Foucault, Karen Barad (1998) develops an account of tech- nologies as material and discursive practices, combined in ways that con- stitute durable objects. With the help of Bohr’s concept of the ‘apparatus’ of observation, Barad aims to extend Foucault’s investigations into the materialization of human bodies to include the question of how non- human objects come into being. In the process she contributes to a growing corpus of writings within science and technology studies that address the question of how new objects are congured in and through technoscientic practice. 1 Technologies appear in these investigations as socio-material apparatuses that align themselves into more and less coher- ent and durable forms. Viewed in this way, the study of how new technolo- gies emerge shifts from a focus on invention, understood as a singular event, to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. The shift from an analysis in terms of form and function to a performative account, moreover, carries with it an orientation to the British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 53 Issue No. 2 ( June 2002) pp. 163–179 © 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE DOI: 10.1080/00071310220133287