Tag Archives: Design Fiction

Symposium 2.1

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This week I participated in the Symposium on Design Fiction. I felt that despite reading all the readings most of them eventually pointed to the fact that Design fiction allowed all of us, and not just designers to explore our creativity, think out of the box and anticipate the unanticipated. “prepare for the future” a future the does not seem realistic. What we consider the most basic part of technology like ” texting” was something that anyone would have imagined possible 30 years ago. Therefore, why are we questioning the impossible? Why not we instead allow the concept of design fiction to help us explore and create better innovations for the future?

 

Through design fiction and the symposium I learn that it brings about the concepts of what ifs and how it does not merely apply in design terms but can aid to change a cultural perspective or maybe even a community. We are able to use fiction as a testing ground for any sort of possibilities. It allows us to create a space with boundaries and make mistakes over and over again without any consequences and outcomes.

 

I felt that after all the readings and talking, there was not much to talk about because it all led up to the same conclusions and ideas on design fiction. Maybe there were more that we could explore, however the symposium ended rather quickly because I felt the concept of design fiction could only help us to see the world as what it could be instead of seeing the world as it already is.

 

Using the concept of design fiction for the advancement of technology is a huge deal and something we can look forward to using in the future. Design fiction, though many ideas may seem unrealistic at this present point, we are hopeful that alongside the advancement of technology, we can use design fiction and its ideas to push and challenge boundaries and one day create better forms of technology that can help better society.

 

Week 2.2 Readings

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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.

Design Fiction

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What do we understand about Design Fiction?

Design Fiction uses fictional scenarios to envision and explain possible futures for design. Sterling spoke about Design Fiction and emphasized that the key term in Design Fiction is neither Design, nor Fiction:  it is diegesis.  His current definition of Design Fiction is that it is “the deliberate use of diegetic  prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”  Diegesis invokes terminology from film studies to refer to “things which are inside the word of the fiction”.

For example: diegetic music in a film would be a song playing on a radio in a scene; non-diegetic music would be underscoring that the audience hears, but which isn’t present in the narrative world.  When Sterling references diegetic prototypes he is invoking a concept by film scholar David Kirby that has also been referenced by Julian Bleecker.

Kirby on the other hand uses the term diegetic prototypes to “account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence”.  This is a central aspect of design fiction:  it uses a fictional frame to make an argument about a potential future by demonstrating that future in a context that a large public audience can understand.

A common example of design fiction that many people understand is the gestural interfaces in the Spielberg Film Minority Report.  Gestural interfaces had been around and viable for years but there was no narrative to drive their use. The film gave the public a concrete narrative of gestural interaction that was compelling and memorable.

A design fiction has to imagine a culture of use for a technology or design that has implications for how it is executed and built.  Using fiction to frame design also affords the consideration of the values, meanings, and implications of the design from an ethical and political standpoint, often highlighting social elements of a design’s use and potential misuse.