W2 – Design Fiction
This week’s reading included an interview with science-fiction writer and design fiction advocate, Bruce Sterling, and Matthew Ward’s article ‘Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice’.
I think design fiction is something people tend to think about subconsciously or retrospectively, but Sterling’s words help to put into perspective how it works as a speculative process as well as why and when it is important.
With new technologies constantly changing and shaping how we live, people often get a bit nostalgic and think/remark on whether or not the things we have today could’ve been imagined 20, 50 or 100 years ago.
Like, “Wow, if someone had told me 20 years ago that I could carry around something the size of a deck of cards and call people with it and use it to look up any piece of information I want and I could see photos and moving images through it, I just wouldn’t believe them. I’d think it was science fiction.”
It’s a valid thought. But what’s just as, if not more, important is transferring that kind of retrospective attitude into speculative thinking.
A step on from this, Sterling and Ward advocate that speculative thinking and design fiction isn’t just about creativity, it’s about practicality. What might the future look like, and what might we need or want in that world?
Sterling says sort of indirectly that in order for design fiction to be good, the subject/product needs to have a legitimate purpose. It doesn’t matter if the technology is conceivable or seems plausible, it just matters that it has a legitimate purpose. If it is deemed useful within the context of this imagined world (diegesis), and we are at some point faced with that state of existence, then the technology will strive to bring that piece of design to life, such that it is no longer fiction.
Building on this, Ward’s article emphasizes the crossover between sociology and science in design fiction. It’s not just a matter of whether it’s feasible to build something of cutting-edge technology, it’s a matter of speculating about the society in which the products/services are required.
It sort of lends to the million dollar question surrounding social media and what comes next. However many years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was creating and preparing a product that would perfectly suit our needs today. We’re a time-poor society of people who want to connect digitally, socially, efficiently and post-geographically. And above all else, as the users, we don’t want to pay for it.
Who out there now has designed in a fictional sense something that will so perfectly address the needs (social, financial etc) of the world ahead of us? And at what point will that piece of design fiction become fact and part of our reality?
A network like Facebook seamlessly lends itself to the social practices of today, but the technology required to bring it to life would have deemed it a piece of science fiction 50 years ago.
If I had a time machine and went back to the 1940s and told my grandmother all about Facebook, she probably couldn’t imagine how something like that would work. But more importantly, probably couldn’t imagine why something like that would work.
It’s a matter of speculating about people and their needs, as well as technology and the possibilities it has. Some people have tried and failed – check out Mashable’s list of companies that ‘Could Have Been Facebook’ had they made more accurate speculations.
Ultimately, a bad work of design fiction is something that doesn’t have a legitimate purpose. The problems it seeks to solve have no real relevance to now or any future issues. If it has relevance, and we are faced with that imagined world, it might just come to be.
So what comes next? That’s the million dollar question.