Readings, Week 2: Enter The Sci-Fi

“We always design for a world that sits, sometimes just slightly, out of sight. We engage in a complex set of actors in order to move our fictions into the realm of the real.”
– Matthew Ward, ‘Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice’

This week’s readings circled around the foreign concept of ‘design fiction’. What I grasped, essentially, is that design fiction is a type of design that’s made outside the parameters of the present and instead is made in the context of an alternative, imaginative future. Or, in the words of Ward, “Design as a practice never exists in the here and now… designers produce propositions for a world that is yet to exist”.

It’s argued that it’s from this kind of design that technology often develops. The general pattern is that we gradually advance closer in the present to the design fiction ideas of the future, and eventually these designs become our reality – in other words, fiction can become non-fiction. It’s in this light that Ward and Sterling promote our ideas of fiction as a legitimate, useful source for ideas.

How exactly is design fiction useful? It’s about being able to ask the ‘what if’ and explore all of the endless possibilities that brunch out from that two word question, all of which are bound to lead to new ideas and innovation.

This is an example of design fiction coming true that immediately jumped into my head when I was doing the Sterling reading (don’t ask why, I swear I haven’t watched Dragon Ball Z since I was about 12):

Dragon Ball Z, circa early ’90s (above) vs Google Glass, 2013 (below)

Uncanny, right? Now it’s just time for newspapers to catch up to Harry Potter. Hurry up, ‘Ruppy Murdoch.