Tag Archives: design fiction

Kane’s mansion building the future of technology

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so, this week’s readings were a bit heavy, mainly because to me, they were so old and, lets say “outdated” technologically, that sometimes i found myself getting lost in all that talk of hypertext. i mean, i’m just assuming hypertext is a hyperlink coz i know what a hyperlink is (well,not really but kinda)

but i know its not. and then it just started talking about the Xanadu program and all i could think of was that huge Xanadu mansion from Citizen Kane because we were forced to watch that movie over 50 times in VCE for media. reading through the document and all the talk of introducing hypertext and saving files online, i was just thinking, “how old is this?”. then i passed the sentence saying that a new product called “CD’s” were coming out and i realised just how old it was, it’s really crazy just how much technology has changed in the last 30 years.

what was interesting was just the innovations and ideas that people were created based off this very, dare i say primitive, system. that already the ideas were being created of storing multiple files on a computer or online rather than on floppy disks, this forward thinking is what got us where we are in technology today. the predictions about the fate of print were interesting too, because although print is not completely dead, it looks to be heading that way with the advancement of our technology.

i think the main ideas to take away from the reading is not necessarily the technological stuff (because lets, face it, we’re way past CD’s now) but more the ideas behind it. how to improve and expand on what we have and make it better and more accessible and simple (yes bad grammar, but that’s the beauty of the blog). coming back to design fiction, its not what we can do with our technology, but what we could do that takes us into the future.

Quantum levitation and warp speeds

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so, in class this week, among other things, we got into some interesting discussions about the potentials of design fiction and current scientific innovation. the main idea i took away from design fiction is the speculation. it’s not about what we can do but what we could do. discussing the reading about design fiction, jake brought up his blog post about design fiction in sci-fi which included some interesting tuff about NASA being at the concept stage of developing the ability to travel at warp speed!! just the possibility of that being feasible is so awesome. who doesn’t hear that and picture themselves sitting in a fancy captain’s chair (like Kirk’s) and telling someone to “jump to light speed”? so cool.

another new scientific development was brought up in class after i continuously rambled on about how cool it would be to have hover boards (see my previous post about hover boards) and this was quantum levitation. here’s a video so you can see just how cool (and i mean that literally, check out the video and you will get it) this new science stuff is.

now, i don’t really do physics (which is prob why i’m doing a media course. well, i also like media) so the actual “how” of quantum levitation makes no sense to me whatsoever. and i think the stuff has to be like really cold for it to work. but, just the fact this is a possibility is what is so awesome, and the possibilities of where it could lead to is what’s really exciting.

if you want more info on the actual science and stuff behind the quantum levitation, check out this video here which has  dr Boaz Almog explaining the whole thing. more awesome science advancement stuff coming out of israel, love it

iPads in 1968?

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one of the readings this week was about design fiction. what is design fiction you ask? i’m still not entirely sure of a full and proper definition but here’s the one given in the interview: “It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. ” (the interview blog can be found here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html).

kinda confusing but as i continued reading i began to understand a bit more (just a bit). that design fiction is creating things that we don’t have. kinda. i know what i mean. i just can’t really get it into words.like a prototype for something that hasn’t been made yet. like the hover boards in back to the future 2 (which i’m still very upset that we don’t have yet, btw. even if it did struggle over water).

what i don’t get is whether design fiction is supposed to simply remain just that, fiction, or whether it’s to be used as a method for innovation and the creation of new technologies. like that “a day made of glass” video that was featured in the post. is it made purely as fiction, for people to watch and wish for, or as something that will hopefully become a reality one day? coz that glass stuff was cool. although you’d probably get a bit sick of everything being see through all the time. that world was very bright. but all the intense touch screen stuff was great.

one of the other things mentioned in the article as design fiction   was the apparent iPad’s that can be seen in the 1968 movie “2001: a space odyssey”. for one, those didn’t really look too much like iPads.they were just big square things that were showing a video. although i guess that’s essentially what an iPad is. but there’s been stuff like that in every sci-fi show you can see on tv. star trek has a bunch of technology that didn’t exist when the show was made. (kudos to arthur. i got that great star trek meme from his blog. loved it so much i wanted to include it in mine too).

another example that came to mind was the thunderbirds. another old sci-fi show, thunderbirds had a bunch of awesome technology, some of which actually exists now today that didn’t back then – such as sliding doors (no not the movie, i mean doors that open when someone approaches them). no, we still don’t have those awesome hovercraft things that they used to cut that family out of the burning building, but maybe one day we will. i think that is the point of design fiction. innovative thinking and use of media and technologies to create things that we used to only be ably to dream about. and who knows, maybe one day soon we’ll all be moving about on hover boards, wearing shoes that tie their own laces and jackets that dry us off if we happen to fall into a lake because the hover board couldn’t get us across.