By Design

This week’s readings revolved around the concept of ‘design fiction’, which, as sci-fi author Bruce Sterling defines it, is the “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change”.

It took me quite a while to get my head around this concept, but I think I’ve worked out that it involves using fiction to speculate on how the future will be, or to experiment with new ideas.

The first reading is a simple, and mercifully short, interview with Sterling, where he details this intriguing concept. He identifies the fact that for something to qualify as ‘design fiction’ there must be “serious design thinking behind them”, rather than just showy drama, such as zombie movies.

Design fiction can often be seen in the smaller, background pieces of information in fiction, and as Sterling states, a relevant example is that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where characters are shown to be using what resembles an iPad.

The film was released in 1968. The first iPad was released in 2010. Director Stanley Kubrick was speculating on what direction technology could practically go, and he got it exactly right. He got it so right that Samsung attempted to use its appearance in the film as evidence as prior art before Apple’s patent.

I can’t count how many times I’ve watched/read science-fiction and thought “that would be cool if it existed”, and this is an example of the effectiveness of design fiction. Sterling labels it a “new set of tools that…[are] giving futurism a second wind”.

There are numerous examples of design fiction featuring in movies and short films, such as this one, Fly Me To The Moon.

This short details possible developments in electronic payment; it has obvious, and very real potential to be exactly what happens in the very near future, but it is still viewed as ‘sci-fi’.

The thing that first jumped to my mind while going through the reading was 1984. The iconic novel is the most obvious example of design fiction, showcasing a dystopian future of constant government surveillance. Now, unfortunately, it seems as possible as ever, with recent NSA developments and the like.

Unfortunately, one of the most promising and exciting pieces of design fiction, the hoverboard in Back To The Future, has still not come to fruition.

I think this the idea of ‘design fiction’ is crucially relevant to the course of Networked Media, as this is the way that it will be taught. It is run on a ‘speculative design’, one that will adapt and alter itself with how we interact with it. In many ways, it is a practical, and grounded-in-evidence, vision of how media course will be run in the near future.

Who knows, one day, maybe our blogs will be looked back on in the same vein as that iPad in 2001, as a precursor to the norm?