After this week’s lecture, our tutors Elliot and Jasmine spent 15mins sharing their interpretation about science fiction and design fiction. In terms of their experience , I found there is a plenty of interests of the relationship between these two kinds of fiction. Elliot mentioned that the science fiction always ask something what will suppose to happen and the design fiction is to attempt to use fictional elements to anticipate the future. So I tried to discover more information about these aspect.

I found a blog called “How to think about the future” one article of which the author discusses about the relationship between Si-Fi and design fiction.  First of all, the writer thinks the purpose of Si-Fi speculates  about the future as a way of analyzing  the present. Nobody can make promise what will happen in the future, however, we can anticipate the future based on reality. So the Si-Fi attempt to figure our some kind of current question in a fiction world by imagination to persuade audience to concentrate on, like Elliot said, what will suppose to happen.

About design fiction, the author considers that  DF prefers to obtain the impact of technologies in the future with using the prototype object and device in the real world. It’s a sufficient way to see how the technique of fiction and drama might be manipulated and how people might respond to new designs. However, there is a inherent problem for design fiction, similarly with Si-Fi that imagination from the present world, and the speculative design are in terms of the range knowledge of today, not tomorrow, so their assumption and convention are those of  the present. Both design fiction and science fiction confront a hard question: how can you imagine characters whose personalities are formed by an entirely different social and technological  landscape?

According to the article, between design fiction and science fiction, their relationship is interesting and intricate. Both of them possess limitations and inherent expectations that help us to understand more about our relationship with technology, with each other and with our environment, but they also understand that their usefulness as truly predictive disciplines is less  fully formed. The author draw the conclusion to suggests us designers, futurists and technologists who have’t  already done so to read as much of the great Science Fiction as they can get their hands on, and also study some of the literary debate about this work because it may hold a lot of illuminating insights into how you can go about designing the future, and where you can go wrong.

(Source from: http://www.howtothinkaboutthefuture.com/?p=20)