Prototyping can be reframed as a critical practice, less about creating short-term solutions and more about challenging the systems that shape the present. At Fab Lab Barcelona, and through the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (a collaboration between IAAC and ELISAVA), we prototype alternative presents as a way to explore and enact plural futures. Rooted in our maker origins, prototyping becomes a tool for inquiry: a means to question dominant narratives, shift power relations, and foreground local, participatory forms of knowledge.

In an age dominated by extractive AI and centralised innovation, we advocate for situated intelligences: ways of knowing grounded in making, care, and context. Our lab functions as a contemporary agora, where projects cultivate emerging and commoning intelligences that resist one-size-fits-all futures.

By embracing prototyping as a way to investigate rather than validate, we move beyond solutionism. Our prototypes are not predictions of the future, invitations to shape it—together. This is call to reclaim hope by building the world otherwise, from the ground up.