Science Fiction meets Design Fiction

 

After this week’s lecture, our tutors Elliot and Jasmine spent 15mins sharing their interpretation about science fiction and design fiction. In terms of their experience , I found there is a plenty of interests of the relationship between these two kinds of fiction. Elliot mentioned that the science fiction always ask something what will suppose to happen and the design fiction is to attempt to use fictional elements to anticipate the future. So I tried to discover more information about these aspect.

I found a blog called “How to think about the future” one article of which the author discusses about the relationship between Si-Fi and design fiction.  First of all, the writer thinks the purpose of Si-Fi speculates  about the future as a way of analyzing  the present. Nobody can make promise what will happen in the future, however, we can anticipate the future based on reality. So the Si-Fi attempt to figure our some kind of current question in a fiction world by imagination to persuade audience to concentrate on, like Elliot said, what will suppose to happen.

About design fiction, the author considers that  DF prefers to obtain the impact of technologies in the future with using the prototype object and device in the real world. It’s a sufficient way to see how the technique of fiction and drama might be manipulated and how people might respond to new designs. However, there is a inherent problem for design fiction, similarly with Si-Fi that imagination from the present world, and the speculative design are in terms of the range knowledge of today, not tomorrow, so their assumption and convention are those of  the present. Both design fiction and science fiction confront a hard question: how can you imagine characters whose personalities are formed by an entirely different social and technological  landscape?

According to the article, between design fiction and science fiction, their relationship is interesting and intricate. Both of them possess limitations and inherent expectations that help us to understand more about our relationship with technology, with each other and with our environment, but they also understand that their usefulness as truly predictive disciplines is less  fully formed. The author draw the conclusion to suggests us designers, futurists and technologists who have’t  already done so to read as much of the great Science Fiction as they can get their hands on, and also study some of the literary debate about this work because it may hold a lot of illuminating insights into how you can go about designing the future, and where you can go wrong.

(Source from: http://www.howtothinkaboutthefuture.com/?p=20)

 

Week 3: About Design Fiction

 

What is design fiction? Honestly, I have never heard these words before. For me, personally, I just hit on the idea of disgin fiction with going through the class readings. In this modern era, technologies perhaps would be the first word to indentify our lifestyle, iPhone, iPad, MP3 and something whatever. Even I could say we, human beings was trapped in the technologies. The devervasting breakthroughs, again and again, features our life! I think all the things happen around is the concept of design fiction. WHY? Let’s take a flashback for our currently past years. What was going on in this world? What kind of cell was in your pocket in 2006, or even it wasn’t there. And, is there anything else in your bag except books. Well, I anticipate someone hasn’t brought a book anymore now.

 

I can tell a true stroy did happen around me in one of the tutuorial of last sememster. One of the member in our room said who will brings a paper to university now while our tutor asked us to write down something on the paper. Although I can take that arrogent thought, the guy bring out the ideology for this generation which is feartured  by the technologies. I mean, we experience a bunch in a blur. New tech appears in front of us like a flash. It is too fast to give a reaction, a respond to the technologies. We are living in a breakthrough era where we can expect the born of new things and exprience it. The tendency is, absolutely, dominate the era.

In terms of the readings, the most significant concept of disign fictions is “diegetic” prototype. The readings encourage us to discover the protential objects and service and struggle to make people notice the world. The disign fiction is not mimetic fiction but a design. It reflects the world rather than tells a story.

The design fiction is a concept about creatity. The more you know, the more you think and the more you make. However, here is the fooly question. Where is your creatity? A designer must not create something impressive solely depends on their mind. The creatity is real and an idea is based on an old idea. The designer absords a diversity of knowledge from the world, they observe how this world runs. Perhaps, one day, two very different things just confront in designer’s mind. The imagination should be based on the reality so that we can produce our idea. But design fiction is not haox. Some people just take advantage of design fiction to cheat people something which never ever exist in this world for their guilt criminal issue.  The design fiction should have cornerstone which refers to the diegetic prototype in the world.

Here is a interesting ad by intel. Let’s see how they combine two irrelevant things together and make them become perfectly make sense!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohYQTIO04Is&list=PL8A0556F28C867BB3