Prototyping Social Forms
The Process Germ Bank

Can collaborative research-creation practices be organized so that they are singular to the specific individuals, institutions, and milieus that they involve but, at the same time, remain accessible and communicable to general publics that might repurpose and revalue them?

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The interdisciplinary and international collective Prototyping Social Forms (PSF) develops platforms, techniques, and technologies to make locally generated knowledge transportable and transformable, forming such knowledge into “germs” that can "sprout" in disparate learning and research environments. 

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PSF’s work revolves around the practice of prototyping—the generation of models, or rather, germs, that can develop and grow in various ways and within different contexts, without assuming a fixed outcome. By focusing on the practice of prototyping, PSF attends to processes of development and their dynamics, as well as the limiting and enabling constraints of different “knowledge ecologies”. 

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Inspired by “seed banks” developed and maintained by horticulturalists and ecologists, the PSF Process Germ Bank is an experimental infrastructure for sharing germs of research-creation practices and for developing signature methods for probing and promoting diversity within different knowledge ecologies.