Design Fiction: “An approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling.” I’d never heard of this concept prior to reading Slate’s interview with Si-fi writer Bruce Sterling, and it wasn’t easy to get my head around.
From what I read, I can define it in my own words as simply a thing, a concept (fictional) that is ‘designed’ to tell a story about change, or anything implicit of change being present in the world. Videos of future gadgets being used, abstract montages of the apparent computing of various CCTV clips, an instrument used in a 2001 movie, or even the simple concept of flying to the moon by flapping your arms can all be described as ‘Design Fictions”.
It was hard for me to understand at first because the term ‘design fiction’ encapsulates so many different concepts that vary greatly in degrees of abstractedness, such as the video clip montage of machines detecting and computing human movements and interactions through CCTV footage.
Ultimately, the goal of deign fictions is to steer away from great futuristic political hypotheses or evolutions of women’s rights but rather focus on the individual interactions between human and objects to “tell worlds rather than stories.”