Open Prototyping – A Toolkit for Open Engineering?: The Case of The New Real Observatory, an Environmentally-Conscious Generative AI Platform

The framework of Open Engineering (OE) describes the practical realization of collaborative interdisciplinary and cross-organisational innovation projects, combining the Research and Development (R&D) processes and knowledge management, with stakeholder engagement and hands-on (systems) engineering activities. However, these concepts have so far been used analytically and practical tools are needed to turn them into integrated applied practices. In this paper we describe the development and use of one such methodology and process model called Open Prototyping (OP). We are examining its six stages as used in developing The New Real Observatory, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform for environmentally-conscious exploration of data processing. The results demonstrate the utility of this toolkit and its alignment with OE framework, whilst also exposing the critical role of facilitators in managing stakeholders' expectations as well as negotiating values and possibilities to ensure eventual delivery of successful outputs. This reinforces the previous work on practices of OE and the critical role of innovation intermediaries in advancing collaborative high-tech R&D.