My takeaway idea from this week’s readings on design fiction comes from the Knutz, Markussen & Christensen reading “The Role of Fiction in Experiments within Design, Art & Architecture”. What stood out for me in this reading is how we can use “what if” questions to speculate about what the world could be in the future. The reading uses the example of sci-fi stories and how they always invite us to imagine a scenario that has not yet come to be; in other words, a world that, for now, only exists as a future possibility. Take Gattaca, for example. What if we could modify our genes to be better looking, more intelligent, more successful than others?

When we ask “what if”, we are not looking for a definitive answer. It is a more explorative exercise than that. Using “what if” questions can be useful for thinking about the changing nature of the network, and what possibilities these new changes might present to us.

I also made the connection between the idea of the “what if” and Chris Argyris’ theory of double-loop learning. For me, asking “what if” is ingrained deeply in the double-loop system, and this is because in order to undertake double-loop learning, we need to ask ourselves, “What if I try a different approach, rather than repeating a process that does not work or is not as efficient as it could be?” Speculation is very much a part of this process of questioning our assumptions about something, reassessing them and attempting a different direction. You don’t necessary know if your new approach is going to work, so until it does, it remains open and speculative. I’m not sure how accurate that interpretation is, but, you know, I’m speculating…