It is said that s good but critical design will often challenge its audience’s preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and the surrounding environment. Critical Designers generally believe design that provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions fundamental assumptions can make a valuable contribution to debates about the role technology plays in everyday life.

Steerings emphasis on doing things in a literary or generic fashion actually harms one’s ability to mess with people’s heads, which is kind of his end goal. He has the classic science fiction objects such as ray guns, time machines, robots, humanoid androids, urban battle suits, two-way wrist communicators and so forth, and such objects, which are well known to science fiction thematics, are actually a very small part of the galaxy of potentially thinkable objects. Why is it that science fiction writers have spent so much time and intellectual effort on this small set of imaginary objects? Well, it’s because it suits their literary purposes; they can be made to look good on paper and they’re good participants in dramatic situations.

Design, I think, has a lot to offer. I’m wondering if there isn’t a much larger space in design fiction than we thought. Maybe there’s something beckoning over the horizon that’s not design and not futurism but just something we might call speculative culture. Like, can we find a set of principles or a way to grapple this larger set of social possibilities? Steerling listed a few of the approaches that he thought both design and science fiction have in common: scientific experiment, scenario work of all kinds, user observation studies, simulation, story boards, story telling, flow charts, analytical software, interaction design, brainstorming, historical analogy, extrapolation and last but not least mash-ups.