Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination circles the entire world. – Albert Einstein
Two age old arch-nemesis’ who have spent centuries being pitted against each other head on the in public secondary education system. Until you leave high-school you’re either an academic (primarily science or maths inclined) or you’re a creative (arts student), then when you get out of school you realise that these qualities can co-exist and that you’ve been living a lie and just wasted twelve years of your life. Well, at least that’s how the school system makes you feel. Most of the time.
So now it’s the next big thing, integrating science and creativity on a pedagogical level and in the industry. This is huge, alarming, revolutionary stuff. It isn’t really, the concept has been around for ages. Lots of scientists were also big “creative” thinkers outside of their crafts. Aside from that, science does require a level of creativity, at least when it comes to scientific advancements and inventions. But this Design Fiction stuff, this is something that’s new and innovative. Even if it’s just the scale that the ideas are considered on.
Science fiction, disgusting, isn’t that what nerds watch? How can that stuff be good for the world, it’s just a way for freaky teenage boys to get off over beautiful blue women and intergalactic princesses (Wiki’s are a wonderful thing, aren’t they). Well Not anymore (if it even was in the past). Design Fiction is the new Science Fiction. It’s professional, has integrity and isn’t based around alien species with voluptuous figures. Thanks to Bruce Sterling, the concept of sci-fi (that is speculation and creativity in regards to possible futures) is now a viable method of design and creativity, one that is increasing our human capacity for creative freedom. I talk about the basics of this here: Design Fiction.
As Simon Grand and Martin Wiedmer discuss in, Design Fiction: A Method Toolbox for Design Research in a Complex World, the manner in which science is treated and utilised is changing and adapting, with a interests invested in how scientific research could be used for creativity and constructive processes. Design processes are being incorporated with this idea to construct what we now know as Design Fiction, and use it to develop and research in our “complex world”.
They argue that Design fiction is a “toolbox” of methods that should be utilised in design research in order to accommodate the future needs of our world. In relation to design research and it’s relation to scientific practice and research, they identify six criteria that are considered important for the functionality of this “toolbox”:
- (1) design fiction requires methods, practices and tools which allow for the creation and construction of possible future worlds, in relation to the actual world;
- (2) furthermore, these methods, practices and tools must allow for materializing those possible future worlds, in terms of images, artifacts and interactions realized in diverse media;
- (3) in addition, it is important to develop a method toolbox which is characterized by a plurality of different perspectives and approaches, which get beyond ideological premises and allow to map and assemble the pluralities and the multitude of potentially relevant perspectives;
- (4) furthermore, these methods and tools must be able to represent, visualize and document the experimentation processes;
- (5) then, we emphasized the importance of understanding experimentation as being generated through an experimental system, which implies a focus on asking a series of questions, allowing for a series of experiments, or the exploration of a series of related hypotheses. Finally,
- (6) it is important to understand that these multiple methods and tools, visualizations and representations, experiments and questions, will change the design research practices themselves over time.
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