I thought this week’s symposium worked really well to allow students to hear a variety of views on how design fiction fits into the world. It also reminded me of something my mother mentioned years ago about the kinds of thinkers we need in government – something I’m starting to make more sense of as I refer to other issues in the Networked Media course.

Some things I really like about what was said:

Elliot explained that design fiction is important for understanding what kind of areas our work may fit into in the future. While this wasn’t a huge light bulb moment for me as I’ve been thinking a lot about design fiction how it implores you to speculate about the future and what we might need. It did, however, lend well to Jasmine’s point about design fiction being applicable to any areas of study – e.g. medicine, architecture.

Design fiction speculates about the requirements and possibilities of a future world and the issues inherent to it. For example, will there be new and more complex health problems we need to address? Is there some kind of technology or service we can create to assist in treating these health issues?

Case in point: I imagine living in the 1970s and speculating about generational and social changes in the next 40 years. Perhaps I can see that the baby boomers in Western society are growing up to be more independent of their parents – they appear to value family togetherness less and globalization is mobilizing people and their immediate families away from their cities of origin.

Also, I can see that advancements in modern medicine are keep people alive longer – i.e. those who’ve endured heart attacks and strokes are revived and treated, and go on to live for years in their own homes, yet with some ailments and health problems that at any moment may need urgent medical attention.

These are the health and social issues of the imagined future that speculative anthropologist me of the 1970s anticipates for the next 40 years.

Considering this, I conceptualise a device that may assist in dealing with these issues. Mobile technology is in its infancy, but I can see that there is potential for small devices that may be able to fit comfortably in one’s pocket. Say we were to develop a pocket-sized device that was programmed to send out an alarm to medical professionals as well as family at the touch of a button. That way, elderly people at risk of having medical emergencies could hold onto this device and send out the alarm in case of a fall, or another person has found them collapsed in the street and so on.

It would be revolutionary in ensuring that people are able to receive urgent and important medical attention, even if they live on their own.

To me, that’s the kind of speculative design fiction that makes sense socially and technologically. It’s about imagining the future, our state as a society, the problems and opportunities we will be faced \with and what products and services we could develop to address them.

I also liked Brian’s point that design fiction is about play, but it is also humble. It’s about what kinds of materials you can use to speculate about the future, without being particularly “obnoxious” with inventive ideas. It’s about practicality because, at the end of the day, that’s what matters. It’s not about having the biggest ideas, it’s about having effective ideas.

The discussions from the Symposium also reminded me of something my mum told me years ago: she had read or watched something on TV that advocated politics as being in need of more creative thinkers – that our politicians needed to come from the fields of architecture and design instead of law and science because they were the problem solvers and innovative thinkers.

The discussions we’ve had surrounding design fiction absolutely supports this idea. I’m not particularly schooled on legal studies and practice, nor architecture, but I think of lawyers as working with the existing state of things – navigating the “system” as is, so accustomed to systems such that there is hardly any room for innovation. Therein lies a culture of Model I thinkers.

This is contrasted to people of design, which Adrian mentioned are becoming more valued by large corporations for their innovation and speculative thinking. Designers are not constrained by the limits of “now” – they think outside the box, imagine a future and an ideal and make it happen. Or rather, they are the experience designers whose innovations are implemented by content producers.

Oksana Faryna of the Kyiv Post kind of lends to this idea in her article “Ukraine needs designers, not just economists and lawyers”. Although her points are quite Europe-specific in mentioning how Ukraine needs to build more beautiful public spaces to counter the grey and cluttered streets of a post-Soviet state, there are some concepts about these public spaces and the attention government should be giving them which work on a multinational scale:

“Effective use of public space determines quality of life. It can aid communication and build communities. It’s what makes Europe European.”

These ideas about experience design opposed to functionality and working within a system lend to the overarching ideals and values of what we study in Networked Media as well as the ideas of Model II learning. We don’t want to be the paper pushers, the ones who smash out the copy or painstakingly work on implementing a design. We want to be the thinkers who create (experience designers) and push for others to implement great ideas that have purpose, meaning and longevity across whatever world we may be faced with in x years time.

One main idea I took away from last week’s ‘Unlecture’ and tute was this:

Over the last couple of weeks students seem to be getting frustrated about all this talk about learning – like we’re learning about learning alternatively instead of learning alternatively about Networked Media (using the Model II methods, speculative learning etc etc)

What I noticed in class and through other’s blog posts is that we’re all making connections between the Week 2 and Week 3 readings – something that Adrian has admitted was not intended and claimed that the readings are not intended to link to one another.

I think this is a good sign that we are, in fact, adopting this Model II learning method and finding our own way through the course. We’re making connections where we see them fit, not because we’re told to see them.

If we want to go back to the boat metaphor, you may say we’ve found ourselves following our own bit of current or an eddie or something like that… I’m not too good with the maritime jargon.

As I said in my previous posts, I really enjoyed last week’s reading on Design Fiction.

I like how it ties together imagination, creativity, science, practicality and sociology.

Last Thursday night I went to a screening for The Congress as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. I don’t know a heap about sci-fi, and it was a bit more sci-fi than I was expecting.

But it was perfect timing, as after reading Matthew Ward’s article it put a lot of things into perspective.

For example, there were moments where the technological designs made complete ‘social’ sense – technology that could scan people into a computer system and insert them into movies. I think that’s a genius piece of design fiction as the central issue of the film was about ageing actresses who can’t find work for themselves.

It lost me a bit when it skipped 20 years into the future and Robin Wright enters this animated alternate universe. Mostly because I thought ‘why are they animated? What difference does it make that they’re animated rather than live action? If it’s imagined or hallucinated why can’t it just be real figures?’. Maybe that’s because the filmmaker Ari Folman thought it easier or more aesthetically impressive to depict this in an animated world. Or maybe its just bad design fiction.

I personally think it’s just bad design fiction. Why would we need to be animated? It’s kind of cool, but also kind of unnecessary.

Also, Bruce Sterling made the point that bad design fiction would be like seeing people have arms that could flap around and make them fly. Awkwardly enough, that’s exactly what happens late in the film *facepalm*

With all this talk on speculative thinking and design fiction and whatnot, it reminded me of this:

http://theperplexedobserver.tumblr.com/post/8992161618/louis-ck-on-being-bored-im-bored-is-a

[I’m such a rookie blogger that I’m still figuring out how to embed images, so a link will have to do until then…]

It basically just reminds me of how silly it is to be bored by the status quo when it comes to technological trends. But also, in a broader sense, relates to how quickly you can be left behind if you don’t think ahead, don’t imagine new worlds or places, and don’t strive to create them yourself. And really, why wouldn’t you?

This week’s reading included an interview with science-fiction writer and design fiction advocate, Bruce Sterling, and Matthew Ward’s article ‘Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice’.

I think design fiction is something people tend to think about subconsciously or retrospectively, but Sterling’s words help to put into perspective how it works as a speculative process as well as why and when it is important.

With new technologies constantly changing and shaping how we live, people often get a bit nostalgic and think/remark on whether or not the things we have today could’ve been imagined 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

Like, “Wow, if someone had told me 20 years ago that I could carry around something the size of a deck of cards and call people with it and use it to look up any piece of information I want and I could see photos and moving images through it, I just wouldn’t believe them. I’d think it was science fiction.”

It’s a valid thought. But what’s just as, if not more, important is transferring that kind of retrospective attitude into speculative thinking.

A step on from this, Sterling and Ward advocate that speculative thinking and design fiction isn’t just about creativity, it’s about practicality. What might the future look like, and what might we need or want in that world?

Sterling says sort of indirectly that in order for design fiction to be good, the subject/product needs to have a legitimate purpose. It doesn’t matter if the technology is conceivable or seems plausible, it just matters that it has a legitimate purpose. If it is deemed useful within the context of this imagined world (diegesis), and we are at some point faced with that state of existence, then the technology will strive to bring that piece of design to life, such that it is no longer fiction.

Building on this, Ward’s article emphasizes the crossover between sociology and science in design fiction. It’s not just a matter of whether it’s feasible to build something of cutting-edge technology, it’s a matter of speculating about the society in which the products/services are required.

It sort of lends to the million dollar question surrounding social media and what comes next. However many years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was creating and preparing a product that would perfectly suit our needs today. We’re a time-poor society of people who want to connect digitally, socially, efficiently and post-geographically. And above all else, as the users, we don’t want to pay for it.

Who out there now has designed in a fictional sense something that will so perfectly address the needs (social, financial etc) of the world ahead of us? And at what point will that piece of design fiction become fact and part of our reality?

A network like Facebook seamlessly lends itself to the social practices of today, but the technology required to bring it to life would have deemed it a piece of science fiction 50 years ago.

If I had a time machine and went back to the 1940s and told my grandmother all about Facebook, she probably couldn’t imagine how something like that would work. But more importantly, probably couldn’t imagine why something like that would work.

It’s a matter of speculating about people and their needs, as well as technology and the possibilities it has. Some people have tried and failed – check out Mashable’s list of companies that ‘Could Have Been Facebook’ had they made more accurate speculations.

Ultimately, a bad work of design fiction is something that doesn’t have a legitimate purpose. The problems it seeks to solve have no real relevance to now or any future issues. If it has relevance, and we are faced with that imagined world, it might just come to be.

So what comes next? That’s the million dollar question.