Design Fiction

You are on chapter // 01 Design Fiction

Fiction is evolutionarily valuable because it allows low-cost experimenta- tion compared to trying things for real. — Dennis Dutton, overheard on Twitter.

Design is everywhere these days. It gets attached to anything, it seems. It’s a way of distinguishing commodity from considered craftsmanship. Look around a bit and you’ll find many kinds of endeavors — service design, business design, product design, experience design, industrial design, circuit design, finance design, research design — that have had design stitched onto design with a simple hyphen.

I might imagine that such happens rather generically. The hyphen is a trope, a grammatical meaning-making code that says —we haven’t entirely worked through what it might be to do finance and design simultaneously. We’ll work it out, but know this — we’re trying to do something different, and clever, and creative and thoughtful.

Design allows you to use your imagination and creativity explicitly. Think as a designer thinks. Be different and think different. Make new, unexpect- ed things come to life. Tell new stories. Reveal new experiences, new social practices, or that reflect upon today to contemplate innovative, new, habit- able futures. Toss out the bland, routine, “proprietary” processes. Take some new assumptions for a walk. Try on a different set of specifications, goals and principles.

(My hunch is that if design continues to be applied like bad fashion to more areas of human practice, it will become blanched of its meaning over time, much as the application of e- or i- or interactive- or digital- to any- thing and everything quickly becomes another “and also” type of redundan- cy.)

When something is “designed” it suggests that there is some thoughtful exploration going on. Assuming design is about linking the imagination
to its material form, when design is attached to something, like business
or finance, we can take that to mean that there is some ambition to move beyond the existing ways of doing things, toward something that adheres
to different principles and practices. Things get done differently somehow, or with a spirit that means to transcend merely following pre-defined steps. Design seems to be a notice that says there is some purposeful reflection and consideration going on expressed as the thoughtful, imaginative and mate- rial craft work activities of a designer.

There are many ways to express one’s imagination. I’ve chosen fairly ma- terial ways over the years — engineering, art-technology, a small bit of writing. Nowadays, design occurs to me to be especially promising along side of the other forms of creative materialization I have explored. It pro- vides a way to embed my imagination into the material things I’ve been making because it looks to be able to straddle the extremes of hard, cold fact (engineering) and the liminal, reflective and introspective (art). Design plays a role across this spectrum in various specific ways. There is no single, canonical design practice that is found across this range. But, just as there is “computer design” or “database design” or “application design” as it pertains to the world of science and engineering; just as there is design to be found in the routines of art making, whether adherence to style or genre in such a way as one might refer to art and design, we can say that design, if only the word but probably much more, is a practice with the ability to travel and be taken-up in various creative, material-making endeavors. Probably because of where I am learning about design (an advanced design studio), and prob- ably because I have not come to it formally, as through a degree program, there is an incredible malleability to how I can make design into something that is useful to what I do, which is making new, provocative sometimes pre- posterous things that reflect upon today and extrapolate into tomorrow.

From this starting place, I think of design as a kind of creative, imagina- tive authoring practice — a way of describing and materializing ideas that are still looking for the right place to live. A designed object can connect an idea to its expression as a made, crafted, instantiated object. These are like props or conversation pieces that help speculate, reflect and imagine, even without words. They are things around which discussions happen, even with only one other person, and that help us to imagine other kinds of worlds and experiences. These are material objects that have a form, certainly. But they become real before themselves, because they could never exist outside of an imagined use context, however mundane or vernacular that imagined context of social practices might be. Designed objects tell stories, even by themselves.

If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre? Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction? Telling stories that appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else?

Design fiction as I am discussing it here is a conflation of design, science fact, and science fiction. It is a amalgamation of practices that together bends the expectations as to what each does on its own and ties them to- gether into something new. It is a way of materializing ideas and specu- lations without the pragmatic curtailing that often happens when dead weights are fastened to the imagination.

The notion that fiction and fact could come together in a productive, creative way came up a couple of years ago while participating in a reading group where a colleague presented a draft of a paper that considered the science fiction basis of the science fact work he does. He saw a relationship between the creative science fiction of early television in Britain and the shared imaginary within the science fact world of his professional life. There were linkages certainly, suggesting that science fiction and science fact can share common themes, objectives and visions of future worlds.

My colleague was not saying that the science of fact and the science of fiction were the same. In fact, he was explicitly not conflating the two. Nevertheless, coming from a computer science professor I found this idea intriguing in itself. It was certainly something to mull over.1 What was per- colating in my mind was this liminal possibility of a different approach to doing the same old tired stuff. This notion presented a new tact for creative exploration — a different approach to doing research.

I wondered — rather than an approach that adheres dogmatically to the principles of one discipline, where anything outside of that one field of prac- tice is a contaminant that goes against sanctioned ways of working, why not take the route through the knotty, undisciplined tangle? Why not employ science fiction to stretch the imagination? Throw out the disciplinary con- straints one assumes under the regime of fact and explore possible fictional logics and assumptions in order to reconsider the present.

Finally, I recognized that the science fact and the science fiction he was discussing were quite closely related in practice and probably quite inextrica- bly and intimately tangled together, more so then the essay may have been letting on. In other words, I began to wonder if science fact and science fiction are actually two approaches to accomplishing the same goal — two ways of materializing ideas and the imagination.

My bias — arrived at through a mix of skepticism, experience, and desire to do things differently — is that, generally, it seems that science fiction does a much better job, if only in terms of its capacity to engage a wider au- dience which oftentimes matters more than the brilliant idea done alone in a basement.

My question is this — how can science fiction be a purposeful, deliberate, direct participant in the practices of science fact?

This is what this essay on design fiction is about. It is one measure mani- festo, one measure getting some thinking off my chest, one measure re- flection on what I think I have been doing all along, and one measure explanation of why I am doing what I am doing.

Science fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects — or designed fictions — can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software. The assembled design fictions are component parts for different kinds of near future worlds. They are like artifacts brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over. They are puzzles of a sort. A kind of object that has lots to say, but it is up to us to consider their mean- ings. They are complete specimens, but foreign in the sense that they repre- sent a corner of some speculative world where things are different from how we might imagine the “future” to be, or how we imagine some other corner of the future to be. These worlds are “worlds” not because they contain ev- erything, but because they contain enough to encourage our imaginations, which, as it turns out, are much better at filling out the questions, activi- ties, logics, culture, interactions and practices of the imaginary worlds in which such a designed object might exist. They are like conversations pieces, as much as a good science fiction film or novel can be a thing with ideas embedded in it around which conversations occur, at least in the best of cases. A design fiction practice creates these conversation pieces, with the conversations being stories about the kinds of experiences and social rituals that might surround the designed object. Design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds.

What are these stories? They are whatever stories you want to tell. They are objects that provide another way of expressing what you’re thinking, perhaps before you’ve even figured out what you imagination and your ideas mean. Language is a tricky thing, often lacking the precision you’d like, which is why conversation pieces designed to provoke the imagination, open a dis- cussion up to explore possibilities and provoke new considerations that words by themselves are not able to express. Heady stuff, but even in the simplest, vernacular contexts, such stories are starting points for creative exploration.

Design is the materialization of ideas shaped by points-of-view and prin- ciples that tell you “how” to go about materializing an idea. Principles are like specifications of a sort, only the kind I am describing are of a more interpretive, imaginative and elastic sort. Not like engineering specifications, or the typical list of contents one finds in most any designed object — espe- cially gadgets, like the flavors of WiFi, types of USB, quantities of gigabytes, diagonal screen inches, etc. Design principles are like the embedded DNA of a design, but can be as much a DNA about experiences to be had as in- strumental measurements and adherence to manufacturing codes and trade- mark badges.

Design fiction is a way of exploring different approaches to making things, probing the material conclusions of your imagination, removing the usual constraints when designing for massive market commercialization — the ones that people in blue shirts and yellow ties call “realistic.” This is a dif- ferent genre of design. Not realism, but a genre that is forward looking, beyond incremental and makes an effort to explore new kinds of social in- teraction rituals. As much as science fact tells you what is and is not pos- sible, design fiction understands constraints differently. Design fiction is about creative provocation, raising questions, innovation, and exploration.

Environment matters for these unconventional approaches. I play in a studio that’s really exceptional, with incredibly creative designers whose have excellent listening skills and do not start with assumptions that are euphe- misms for constraints and boundaries and limits. I’m not just saying that, its a point of pride in the studio. We don’t design products, if such is taken to mean the product of manufacturing plants, rather than the product of active, thoughtful imaginations. But we do design provocations that con- front the assumptions about products, broadly. Our provocations are objects meant to produce new ways of thinking about the near future, optimistic futures, and critical, interrogative perspectives. We clarify and translate stra- tegic vectors, using design to investigate the many imaginable near futures. It’s a way of enhancing the corporate imagination, swerving conversations to new possibilities that are reasonable but often hidden in the gluttony of overburdened markets of sameness. Running counter to convention is part of what some kinds of science fiction — rather, design fiction — allows for. This is especially valuable in the belly of a large organization with lots of history and lots of convention.

Design fiction is a mix of science fact, design and science fiction. It is a kind of authoring practice that recombines the traditions of writing and story telling with the material crafting of objects. Through this combina- tion, design fiction creates socialized objects that tell stories — things that participate in the creative process by encouraging the human imagination. The conclusion to the designed fiction are objects with stories. These are stories that speculate about new, different, distinctive social practices that assemble around and through these objects. Design fictions help tell stories that provoke and raise questions. Like props that help focus the imagina- tion and speculate about possible near future worlds — whether profound change or simple, even mundane social practices.

Design fiction does all of the unique things that science-fiction can do as a reflective, written story telling practice. Like science fiction, design fiction creates imaginative conversations about possible future worlds. Like some forms of science fiction, it speculates about a near future tomorrow, ex- trapolating from today. In the speculation, design fiction casts a critical eye on current object forms and the interaction rituals they allow and disallow. The extrapolations allow for speculation without the usual constraints intro- duced when “hard decisions” are made by the program manager whose con- cerns introduce the least-comon denominator specifications that eliminate creative innovation. Design fiction is the cousin of science fiction. It is con- cerned more about exploring multiple potential futures rather than filling out the world with uninspired sameness. Design fiction creates opportuni- ties for reflection as well as active making.

Design fiction works in the space between the arrogance of science fact, and the seriously playful imaginary of science fiction, making things that are both real and fake, but aware of the irony of the muddle — even claiming it as an advantage. It’s a design practice, first of all — because it makes no au- thority claims on the world, has no special stake in canonical truth; because it can work comfortably with the vernacular and pragmatic; because it has as part of its vocabulary the word “people” (not “users”) and all that implies; because it can operate with wit and paradox and a critical stance. It assumes nothing about the future, except that there can be simultaneous futures, and multiple futures, and simultaneous-multiple futures — even an end to ev- erything.

In this way design fiction is a hybrid, hands-on practice that operates in a murky middle ground between ideas and their materialization, and between science fact and science fiction. It is a way of probing, sketching and explor- ing ideas. Through this practice, one bridges imagination and materializa- tion by modeling, crafting things, telling stories through objects, which are now effectively conversation pieces in a very real sense. A bit like making science fact prototypes, or props for a science fiction film, but not quite. We’ll get to the “how” later.

When I think of design this way, it feels like it should be understood slightly differently from the all-encompassing “design”, which is why I am referring to it as “design fiction.”