In response to calls for a research and innovation system that is more open to public scrutiny, we have seen a growth of formal and informal public engagement activities in the past decades. Nevertheless, critiques of several persistent routines in public engagement continue to resurface, in particular the focus on expert knowledge, cognitive exchange, risk discourse, and understandings of public opinion as being static. In an attempt to break out of these routines, we experimented with an innovative engagement format that employs situated speculative prototyping to support citizens in contextualizing and discussing developments regarding—in this case—nanotechnology. This format invites participants to imagine and critically reflect on technological futures through collaborative prototyping and story-writing. In this paper, we outline five reconstructed contextualization patterns in which participants engaged during the format’s exercises and use these to assess the value of the format in the current engagement landscape. We show that situated speculative prototyping has potential in the realm of informal public engagement initiatives, taking an explorative approach, but also warn of ‘the designer fallacy’ as a prominent pitfall of prototyping that could reproduce techno-scientific framings and obstruct critical reflection on technological directions and implications if not treated with caution.

为了响应对研究和创新体系更加开放以接受公众审查的要求，在过去的几十年中，我们看到了正式和非正式公众参与活动的增长。尽管如此，对公众参与中几个持久惯例的批评仍在不断浮出水面，尤其是对专家知识，认知交流，风险话语和对公众舆论的理解是静态的。为了打破这些常规，我们尝试了一种创新的参与形式，该形式采用定位的投机原型技术来支持公民情境化和讨论有关纳米技术的发展（在这种情况下）。这种格式邀请参与者通过协作原型设计和故事编写来想象和批判性地思考技术未来。在本文中，我们概述了五种重构的情境化模式，参与者在该模式的练习中参与其中，并使用这些模式来评估该格式在当前互动环境中的价值。我们表明，采用探索性方法，位于现场的投机原型在非正式公众参与计划的领域中具有潜力，但也警告“设计师的谬误”是原型的一个显着陷阱，它可能会重现技术科学框架并阻碍对技术的批判性反思指示和含义（如果未谨慎处理）。