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International audienceIn June 2012, the French car company Renault turned Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, atown on the outskirts of Paris, into a test and demonstration laboratory. The companyintroduced a fleet of 50 electric cars as part of a car-sharing system withoutfixed stations called Twizy Way. This scheme was a component of the manufacturer’sdevelopment strategy for the electric car market. This paper analyses this initiativein order to account for an experimental mode of industrial innovation. Characterisedby the use of sociotechnical instruments in order to explore social and technicaluncertainties and produce public demonstrations, this experimental mode is based onvarious kinds of experiments. Building on Science and Technology Studies andActor Network Theory, this paper discusses two of them, which are in the same timetwo propositions for the organisation of codesign: a planned field test designed byRenault; and the collection of inquiries that resulted from the extension of thenumber of experimenters. These descriptions point to the analytical interest of thestudy of experimental trajectories in public and private interventions related toindustrial projects, particularly in situations where the scope of the involved actorsis not pre-given

Based on the Smart Cities imaginary, the bottom-up project Stgo2020 created a self-tracking device known as Rastreador Urbano de Bicicletas (or Urban Bicycle Tracker) to record the daily trips of cyclists in Santiago de Chile and use the data gathered to help government officials make better and data-driven decisions on cycling infrastructure planning. In this article, we examine the iterative design of this technology as well as its introduction into the everyday practices of cyclists. We argue that efforts to quantify the ordinary experience of cycling were overwhelmed and interrupted by an ecology of breakdowns, everyday contingencies, forgetfulness, and re-interpretations in the assemblage of devices, data, humans, and bicycles. These breakdowns generated incoherent or absurd bits of information that we call them as “idiotic data” based on recent conceptualizations of the character of the idiot. Significant displacements were provoked by these idiotic data, forcing the engineer behind the device to control and purify the sample by design and algorithms, waning the civic nature of the project at the same time. The case shows how new ways of knowing the urban space by smart devices should be not separated from the emergence of idiotic data, putting into question the versions of citizen participation and smartness at stakes.

The use of prototypes as testing instruments has become a common strategy in the innovation of services and products and increasingly in the implementation of "smart" urban policies through living labs or pilots. As a technique for validating hypotheses about the future performance of products or policies, prototyping is based on the idea of generating original knowledge through the failures produced during the testing process. Through the study of an experimentation and prototyping project developed in Santiago de Chile called "Shared Streets for a Low-Carbon District," I analyse the technique of prototyping as a political device that can make visible (or invisible) certain entities and issues, determining what the experimental entities can do and say. I will show how the technique of prototyping defines modes of participation, what is visible and thinkable, what can be spoken and what is unspeakable. In this sense, I examine twoambivalent capacities of prototyping: as a mechanism of management and enrolment that seeks to prescribe normativities (problem-validating prototype) and as an event that can make frictions tangible, articulating matters of concern and ways to open up alternative scenarios (problem-making prototype). K E Y W O R D S curatorial interventions, public frictions, smart city, urban laboratory, urban prototyping

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