PROTOTYPE 2010, the international symposium on crafts organised by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee last month, was one of the last events that is examining Past, Present & Future Craft Practice.

The programme, funded in 2004 by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, has enabled Duncan of Jordanstone to look at, for example, the importance of the little-known House of Falkland, the work of Phoebe Anna Traquair, the creative methods of the jeweller, Georgina Follett, analyse the creative and management processes of craft projects, and the processes involved in craft thinking.

Together, they reflect the belief that knowledge about the crafts usually concentrates on the craft object rather than upon the role played by the crafts in cultural change and development.

Given the title of the symposium, perhaps one should not have been surprised that Dundee University's biomedical engineer, Stuart Brown, discussed the craft involved in making prototypes of cars or that Glenn Adamson, curator of the exhibition on Post Modern design that will be held in the V&A next year, discussed in detail the design of the Chevvy Impala in the 1950s.

The film, The American Look (which is available online), took the viewer from the initial concept sketches through to detailed drawings of fins, tail lights etc., and then the full-scale clay prototype, showing also the colourists (the only women to appear), market experts and finally the all-male board who wore dark-coloured suits and smoked pipes and cigarettes.

Given the views of interiors and the clothes worn by the participants, it was clear that the 1950s was a time of considerable elegance.

Another prototype, this time for a space station, was described by Constance Adams, who works for NASA. She is pushing the boundaries of architecture to create habitable environments for space travel. This requires full-scale modelling - you can't scale down different materials, apparently - as well as an approach to design that has similarities to shipbuilding.

And there were some surprising insights: solar energy along with nano-deposition, tape, wire and dental floss are among the things needed for manufacturing things in outer space while, because of the need for tiny plants, miniature wheat has been developed for space travel.

Then there was the example of how craft products could be used to transform design, in this case the furniture and light fittings designed by Sottsass and others for Alchimea in the early 1980s. As Catharine Rossi, a PhD student at the Royal College of Art in London, pointed out, products by Alchimea were usually one-off designs that were intended to break the linear development of design and crafts by mixing costly materials like marble with plastic laminates, replacing natural or neutral colours with black, red, blue and yellow, and totally ignoring the conventional language of shapes.

What Ms Rossi didn't say (and possibly didn't know) was that Sottsass was unhappy about the effects that Alchimea (and Memphis which followed) had had on the world of design.

What became clear during the symposium was that it was not so much about prototypes per se and how these might be enhanced using laser techniques, computer aided design and rapid prototyping etc., as about the freeing of the imagination. Leonardo Bonanni of the Media Lab at Massachussetts Institute of Technology did talk about how we might all end up wearing computers in clothes that were made of micro fibres, and how craft techniques could greatly improve the design of prostheses and wheelchairs.

But a number of speakers described how prototypes could act as a doorway, as an hypothesis, as a way of exploring the marketplace or even as a playground. There are changes to the use of prototypes, too, as Elizabeth Sanders of Make Tools made clear, noting a change from object to purpose, from invention to intention and from application to implication.

She emphasised the need for co-creation - "we are becoming more important than the object itself" - and the use of design as "an enquiry into the future."

Perhaps the most visionary speaker was the conceptual artist, Simon Starling, whose irreverent attitude towards classical objects was demonstrated by the morphs he made of Poul Henningsen's Artichoke lamp, the aluminium bicycle and chair that were turned into a 'readymade,' and his plans for a hydrogen-powered bike to cross the Spanish desert. Like Sottsass, he is no respecter of boundaries - and much of the symposium was about breaking boundaries in craft and design.

Prototype 2010 followed the Future Craft Research Exposition held at Duncan of Jordanstone three months ago and is part of the ongoing Craft Festival in Scotland that has 57 events in 24 venues across the country. The Festival continues till September.

RICHARD CARR