The reading about Design Fiction is easy to understand as since the language is plain and it doesn’t have a lot of academic terms. But it’s difficult for me somehow since I had no idea about what DF means and I had to search for that first. Unlike what I expected, what I saw from the internet are even harder to understand.

For example, this is what I found on Quora by Joshua Glen Tanenbaum, a PhD candidate in games and narrative:

“The term “Design Fiction” as I understand it was coined by Nokia researcher, and Near Future Laboratory co-founder Julian Bleecker in a presentation given at the Engage Design conference in 2008.  Bleecker’s talk was given in response to an infamous unpublished paper by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell entitled Resistance is Futile: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing.  The term has also been used by science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling in a number of talks, and in an ACM Interactions article entitled Design Fiction. ” 

I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say due to my limited English ability, until I saw another sentence he wrote:

“Design Fiction uses fictional scenarios to envision and explain possible futures for design. ”

So, back to the reading for of the course. Matthew Ward discussed the practice of DF as pedagogic and here’s is how I tried to summarise it. The role of fiction in design is creative (of course), and we create stories ideologically and based on the real world. We pick up ideas and brainstorm based on the world we live in and what happen (happens, or happened) in our lives, we use them as our starting point and we create stories. DF is the ground where we have our experiment and we think during the process of the experience. Therefore DF is based on real life, but beyond it.

 

“What is design fiction?” Tanenbaum. T G

Ward,, Matthew. “Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice.” Medium. Web. 29 July 2013. (PDF)