Jennifer’s dad worked at IBM (the company that famously once thought the world wide market for computers was about five), so he’s seen a lot of change. Including that when staff would have a computer on their desktop, that was crazy talk. The secret to that story is that it was spreadsheet software that drove the personal computer. Spreadsheet software let business people speculate, they could run ‘what if’ scenarios easily by writing a spreadsheet with all the variables to their profit and loss – what happens if we sell this many? If we employ three more people? if the phone bill goes up? And while we don’t have Marty McFly’s hover board, we do have maglev trains, which is freaky.

There were some questions about its role for us, as media people. Here you go. Simple. What do you think you want to do. (Direct, run a media company, design web sites, invent a reality TV franchise, write screenplays). Got something? Now, it is 2020. Write a design fiction. What do you do in your job in 2020? how do you get paid? what stuff do you make? for what/who? where? As I asked a student in honours once, who wanted to do stuff on journalism, “imagine journalism was invented right now, today, with the internet as a given, what would journalism and the ‘press’ be, if it was invented now?”. That’s a design fiction question.

Jackie wonders about the imagining part. The key thing is it isn’t scifi so it is premised on real things. A real concept, technology, or scenario. If FaceBook uses enough electricity to power a city (it does), then how can it be sustained given our reliance on carbon fuel sources and the risks of global warming? That’s ripe for speculative research.