Craigslist For Barter, 2015

Craigslist for Barter brought speculative design into an everyday setting for exchange. Extrapolation Factory invited students in SVA’s Products of Design program to extend their thesis inquiries into the future, then make physical prototypes of the objects they imagined. Each prototype gave a developing research question a form that could be encountered and discussed outside the classroom.

Students posted the objects in Craigslist’s barter section, identifying them as prototypes in the listings. This placed imagined products alongside a familiar format for offering, considering and negotiating exchanges. It also introduced a practical question to the speculative exercise: how might someone understand or respond to this object when encountering it through an ordinary online listing?

Students collected reactions and interactions generated by their posts and brought them back into their thesis research. The process moved from inquiry to speculative object, then into a public setting where responses from people beyond the design classroom could inform the work. The listing became a way to open a research question to an encounter with someone else.