Prototyping the future, prototyping citizens: The trial of Technology Comprehension in Danish Schooling

This paper explores how the Danish school sector currently performs and reworks students’ engagement with digitalization through prototyping. Public schooling is routinely mobilized by the state as part of the solution to perceived societal problems. By law, Danish schooling should prepare students for participation, co-responsibility, rights, and duties in a democratic society. Recently, this includes preparing students for life in an increasingly digitalized democracy. We investigate the Ministry of Children and Education’s trial of ‘technology comprehension’ (2018-2021). This was an experimental effort to determine how to introduce ‘understanding of technology’ into compulsory schooling as a generally formative, creativeconstructive, and critical subject matter combining societal reflection, computer science and design approaches. The curriculum suggested that design approaches, especially, were conducive to agency and empowerment in digital democratic life, making it imperative that students learn to materialize digital artifacts through prototyping. This takes prototyping beyond its traditional use in design and systems development, making experimentalism central to the conduct of citizenship and social life. We examine prototyping across the trial: the curriculum; the trial’s design; the classroom; and the trial’s evaluation. We argue that prototyping functions as a device for intervention in the complexity and uncertainty of a digital democratic future. In this situation, the capacity of prototyping is to keep matters of concern both open and closed across scales, and bind different sites of the trial together. We critically examine the role of the prototype in a democracy in ’perpetual beta’ and the response: educating students to cultivate a design attitude.