3.75

in last week’s class (wk 3) we were given this as a writing stimulus:

“fiction as a testing ground for reality” – Ward

how can writing something speculative and fictional test an idea

I have already gone over (or at least touched on) this in a few of my previous posts about design fiction, but I suppose it’s never a bad thing to rehash work. I suppose in a sense, you can never fail if you’re only speculating, and if your ideas are only in the development phase.  seeing your work in the fictional realm helps to avoid grounding yourself in reality and looking only at the present – therefore limiting the capabilities of your creation. if your work can exist in a fictional or make-believe realm (and you can assess, evaluate and iron out all of the possible issues with it) then it can just as easily exist in the ‘real’ world. through this concept of ‘testing’ and ‘experimentation’ you can pre-empt what kinds of problems you might encounter in bringing it to life. having said that, experimentation is a great way to broaden your horizons and stumble across ideas you might never have come across ordinarily – even if these ideas ‘fail’ in the sense that they can’t be translated into reality, you are at least opening yourself up to new possibilities. often, the best ideas stem from a random tangent – a topic or concept that you have digressed so far from that you can’t even remember the original idea.