Roles of previous prototypes

As I am not a designer by training, I do not have typical examples of previous prototypes to analyse. But my master thesis project could serve as an example of research enquiry that embodies certain prototyping roles. My master thesis consisted in conducting a discourse analysis of populist speech on Twitter to assess whether populist speech varies across the political spectrum (left wing <--> right wing).

To this end, I developed an AI-powered natural language processing tool that performed a sentiment analysis of selected tweets to assess their "emotional load" and the proportion of positive and negative sentiments. This is an example of prototypes as means of enquiry (Role 2) as it collected data to inform the research enquiry.

The final product, my master thesis, could also be considered as a research archetype (Role 3), as the research paper does not have a functional purpose but serves to prove that populist speech varies across the political spectrum as it is influenced by "host ideologies".

Finally, this thesis could also be an example of prototyping as a vehicle for enquiry (Role 4) as the way the data was collected influenced the research outcome. I developed a coding system to label recurring discursive trends within tweets. The labels chosen by subjectively interpreting text significantly shaped my research findings.