Design Fiction

You are on chapter // 02 Design, Science, Fact and Fiction

..science fiction is not necessarily different from the technologies and the sciences it narrativizes, and in fact it creates the conditions for their possi- bility…In other words, the functions and attributes of genre science fiction.. have been incorporated by the technoscienes. — Eugene Thacker, The Science Fiction of Technoscience

This is a short essay about the relationship between design, science fiction and the material objects that help tell stories about the future — mostly props and special effects as used in film and other forms of visual stories, both factual and fictional. It’s a first stab at describing some thinking that arose while reading that essay I just mentioned, which I’ll introduce more completely now.

That colleague I alluded to earlier is called Paul Dourish. Together with Genevieve Bell he co-wrote an important essay on the relationship between science fiction and a field of computer science called ubiquitous computing, or “Ubicomp” for short. Paul is a Professor of Informatics at the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, and Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist from Intel’s People and Practices re- search group. So, they’re smart, insightful, provocative folks. The essay they co-wrote is called “‘Resistance is Futile’: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing” It is an exploration of the relationship between Ubicomp principles on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the plot prin- ciples and general social milieu of some mostly British science fiction televi- sion shows of the 1970s and 1980s.

Their essay is meant to provide insights into Ubicomp itself, as a field of endeavor pioneered by incredibly smart people who grew up with a par- ticular vision of a future, computationally rich world. By revealing some intriguing similarities in terms of the overlapping aspirations and matters- of-concern found within the science fiction stories and implicitly within Ubicomp’s founding principles, the essay weaves together these two “genres” of science work — science fact and science fiction. What are the hopes, aspi- rations and visions of future worlds as expressed in 1970s era science fiction stories and their story props, devices and artifacts? How do they contrast with those of the ubiquitous computing project a couple of decades later, when the future scientists of the 1970s became the visionaries of the 1980s and onward?

When reading the essay, one gets the sense, if you haven’t already had an inkling, that fiction and fact are really quite intertwined, the one shaping and informing the other in a productive, exciting way. And, going further, if such an inkling is to be had, why should one genre of science only inform the other? Without being explicit about it, the essay suggests that one may in fact “do” science fiction not necessarily as a crafter of stories in book form, as most science fiction practitioners do. In other words, one can do science fiction not only as a writer of stories but also as a maker of things.

There’s a reformed kind of science fact just underneath what Bell and Dourish are describing, where one operates as an engineer-designer-specula- tor hybrid seeking a different approach to creative thinking and making. A science-fact that starts from the science-fiction anchorage rather than from the conservative rationality that undergirds most science fact work.

At least, that’s what I read into it. My interpretation here goes further than the one offered in their essay. Bell and Dourish are careful to avoid suggest- ing that science genres are interchangeable in the way my reflections con- sider. They are not suggesting that Ubicomp is actually a kind of science fiction, which is what I believe. I think that Ubicomp is in fact — science fiction. What Bell and Dourish do, and it’s a pretty gutsy bit of work, is put the one alongside the other to reflect on the contrasts and similarities. This by itself is a remarkable step to take, especially considering the audience is that of a proper science fact journal where such a style of literary scholarship — “reading” the two science genres together — is more likely found in the humanities than in computer science and engineering. Juxtaposing in any fashion the “real” work of science fact with the “imaginary” work of science fiction — well, you just don’t do that. It’s not good old fashioned hard science work. It’s not the same as running a study or building a new data encryption algorithm and talking about it in a scientific paper with spartan, terse prose absent of all metaphor. These kinds things are real science work. From a con- servative, pragmatic engineering perspective in which one would never, ever put fact alongside of fiction and expect anything better than ridicule and a nasty peer review — you only run studies or invest time in finding new data encryption algorithms.

Bell and Dourish make their perspective plain when they caution that they do not mean to suggest “..that [ubiquitous computing and science fiction] are equivalent or interchangeable; we want to read ubiquitous computing along- side science fiction, not to read ubiquitous computing as science fiction.” Perhaps they make this move because they really believe this, or perhaps because they want to avoid that ridicule and those nasty peer review notes.

Nevertheless, or perhaps because many good things have come from a bit of ridicule, I became intrigued by the knots of society, technology, politics, and visions of our future imaginary suggested in their essay. These knots, from a slightly sideways glance, create larger interconnected assemblages that are more than a curious reflection on how science fiction relates to Ubicomp. Just at the periphery of their insights I saw the possibility that serious, hands-on work could employ science fiction as a design framework. Like writing and telling stories with design objects, their user scenarios become plot points, filing out richer narratives about people and their quotidian experiences, not scenarios about users punching at little plastic keyboards.

Their essay foregrounds the ways that science fact and science fiction are the same, simultaneous activity, both ways of materializing ideas. When I was asked to write a response to go alongside of the essay’s publication, I had the chance to think about Ubicomp and science fiction and, from there, broader questions arose.

The questions I thought about are these: How can design participate in shaping possible near future worlds? How can the integration of story telling, technology, art and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future? How does the material act of making and crafting things — real, material objects — shape how we think about what is possible and how we think about what should be possible?

I came to the conclusion that there was a practice there, just at the contours of their essay that may as well be called “Design Fiction.”

What follows is a short synthesis of this thinking. The overall goal is modest, which is simply to share some insights and experiences that have helped me think differently about how ideas are linked to their materialization by envel- oping fact with fiction in creative, productive ways. Rather than constraining the ways in which things are made and designed, explore the way fiction is able to probe the further reaches of more habitable near future worlds. This is not meant to be an all-encompassing exposition. Instead, I look at a few examples with some insights to go along with them. It is less a theoretical statement than a travelogue of experiences.

Here is the outline of what follows.

1. Fact and Fiction Swap Properties. These are some thoughts on the ways in which fact and fiction are anchorages for a bridge of continuous variance between the two. Nothing holds fast and there is plenty of continuous traffic back and forth. These are insights into how fact and fiction are pretty well tangled together despite every attempt to keep them distinct.
2. Fiction follows Fact. How are fact and fiction tangled up? In this example, I start from the science fiction anchorage and show how science fiction is in- extricably knotted to science fact. My example comes from the film Minority Report and the mutual, simultaneous speculations about gesture-based interac- tion at the human-computer interface. David A. Kirby’s notion of the diegetic prototype provides a principle for understanding the ways in which science fact and science fiction always need each other to survive. In many ways, they are mutually dependent, the one using the other to define its own contours.
3. Fact follows Fiction. A parallel example of how fiction and fact are tangled up, this one starting from the anchorage of science fact, revealing the complicated interweaving of science fiction ideas, idioms, aspirations and tropes that mutually and simultaneously shape science genres. In this example, I re-introduce Ubicomp through the two essays by Bell and Dourish. This is to outline a contour of Ubicomp that reveals how it is actually a science fiction.

Science fiction has been aligned to the emergence of modern historical consciousness in which the his- torical past is reflected upon and given account in a way that is richer, with more lived drama than annals or chronicles. The historical novel “fills in” the historical chronicle with story, not merely discoveries, the progression of troops across the continent, or the birth of future monarchs.

The modern historical consciousness is a contested topic, but for the purposes here can be stated simply as a perspective that understands the past as culturally particular and with no direct, anticipatory rela- tionship to today’s present. The past can only be understand as a reflection based upon one’s experiences, not something fixed by the chronicle or a history book-of-facts. The past is told and recounted, never ex- perienced directly. In this way, historical writing is a way of creating an interpreted continuity from “then” toward “now” so as to make the present “make sense” based on the progression of past narratives that we then call our history.
As the modern understanding of historical thinking emerges in the late nineteenth century, particular forms of stories about the future-to-come arise, especially those that chart a utopian outline of “up-and- to-the-right” of progress. Defamiliarizing and disrupting this grid to anticipate (or create) alternative pos- sible futures is what science fiction does. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, science fiction can only really be stories about the present just as histories can only ever be reflections on the past based on the present moment. So then design fiction, borrowing from science fiction, is the embodiment of materi- alized reflections on design today, as well as projections and anticipations of the designed futures.

Science fiction as a literary genre serves its purpose as a cultural form in the ways it anticipates and reflects upon the possibilities of a different, other world. It is unique in the canon of literary genres in the way it represents the future, which has been argued to happen broadly in two ways. First, as a way of rendering the world to be in such a way as to “soften the blow” of the rapid pace of technological change. The future world of this kind of science fiction charts the “up and to the right” graph of future progress, wherever that graph may lead, but typically the terminus is the gleaming, streamlined, horn-of-plenty style of Utopian future.

The second form and the one I find more satisfying is less a tour of future perfection and more a reflection on the current state of affairs that serves to, as Frederic Jameson describes it, “defamiliarize and restruc- ture our experience of our own present..” [cf “Progress versus utopia, or, can we imagine the future?” in Frederic Jameson’s “Archeologies of the Future”

In the context of design fiction, this defamiliarization serves the purpose of upsetting things in a produc- tive way, to examine new possible forms, styles and experiences — new rituals and their attendant object materializations. To break away from the insular, habituated forms, experiences, rituals and expectations. Rather than assuming the progression of ideas and their materialization along a predefined chart of incre- mental progress, design fiction assumes no particular course, no specific future world. It begins with the terms familiar to science fiction which is indirection, distraction, disruption and displacement.

Design fiction pushes aside the boring, dangerous chart of “up and to the right” progress which, particu- larly at this time of global economic and environmental calamity, we should finally admit to ourselves is a failed illusion.

Design fiction, like science fiction, speculates, reflects and extrapolates, looking at today from the side, or sideways and forming a critical, introspective perspective that can project into new (future) forms.

“Though scores of earlier motion pictures had endeavored to project man into space and speculate upon the consequences of his first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, 2001: A Space Odyssey was decidedly unique, both in concept and execution. In a cinemat- ic genre where dramatic license was customarily stretched to pre- posterous proportions, 2001 remained staunchly rooted in the sci- entific principles that were so often disregarded by its predecessors.”

This quote is from the cover article in Cineflex, no. 85 on the produc- tion of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. What makes 2001 worth getting just a bit carried away over is the way it was simultaneous with the thinking and making of space travel. The film production took seriously the science fact of space travel by enlist- ing the insights of practicing rocket scientists. This was 1966-68 after all, and the space race was in full swing. There was a great deal of at- tention on the effort both at space agencies and within Kubrick and Clarke’s effort to realize where this race would end up, 30 years in the near future. It is a further indication of the degree to which science fact and the science fiction were intertwined that Kubrick explored the possibility of taking out insurance with Lloyd’s of London against the film’s possible losses should a concurrent space probe’s mission to Mars reveal some bit of science fact — extraterrestrial life? — that would reduce the credibility of his film.

As was typical, Kubrick’s epic production happened on his own terms. It took four years from the time Kubrick contacted Clarke about col- laborating, until the premiere public screening in 1968 to complete the approximately $10 million production. A fair portion of the time was spent in pre-production, considering everything — the techniques and technologies of deep-space travel, the nuances of artificial intelli- gence, the kinds of advanced composite materials and “GUI” displays that might be found on spacecraft in 2001. The detailing and finishing was meticulous and the speculation as grounded in best principles re- garding space travel and related technologies, projected forward into the future.

This approach to story telling and speculating was, at the time, nearly unique as an approach to production for science fiction film. (Destination Moon (1950) and The Conquest of Space (1955) are notable for their production and special effects authenticity based on science facts of the day.) For example, the instrument displays on the space- craft had no real precedent in science fact. There was effectively no “science” of digital information visualization or graphical user interfac- es as such at the time, nor were there off-the-shelf programming tools for developing computer graphics displays semi-automatically, such as Adobe Flash or Processing. Instead, the special effects team used past- ups under a stop-motion camera rig to create the instrument display effects which were rear-projected onto control panels. According to Douglas Trumball, one of several effects supervisors on the film, it took almost a year to produce the readouts for 2001. (Creating Special Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey by Douglas Trumball in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stephanie Schwam editor.

“2001 is no mere science-fiction movie. In truth, to be really accurate, it is more like ‘science-fact’ simply extended a few decades into the future. In his quest for complete authenticity in terms of present and near-future technology, Kubrick consulted constantly with more than thirty technical experts and the results..are an accurate forecast of thingstocome.”In Filming 2001:A Space Odyssey, by Herb A. Lightman in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick engaged many scientists and engineers, including two fellows called Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway. Lange and Ordway hap- pened to arrive in New York City while Clarke and Kubrick were there scriptwriting. They were in town to attend a conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and to promote a book their space consultancy company had written on extra-ter- restrial intelligence. The two were formerly NASA technologists, with the added benefit for a visual story production that Lange was both a draftsman, colorist and intimate with the details of “propulsion systems, radar navigation, docking techniques, and many other matters preoccupying the U.S. aerospace technologists of the day. His job had been to visualize as-yet-unborn vehicle concepts, so that NASA could communicate their ideas for the future.” (Shipbuilding by Piers Bizony in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Proper engineering firms were hired to work within the production design to do such things as construct the space suits that astronauts used based on the science fact, such as they were known at the time, about deep space environ- ments. Materials choices were made based on engineering principles and ex- trapolations of material science into the century following the film production. Models for the space craft went through multiple design iterations, mostly out of Kubrick’s tireless and wearying perfectionism, but also as reflections on the evolving state-of-the-art in that era’s “big science” surrounding the space race. The film is perhaps most effective for its uncanny ability to make the future legible to the audience, at least insofar as it created indexical references to fa- miliar, quotidian bits of 1960s culture as projected into the year 2001.

The overall approach of the production points to a way of designing not only a visual story, but also creating a shared, collective imaginary about a near future world that explores of a myriad of possibilities. Not only the story itself, but also the ‘things in the corner’, at the edge of the production, those things that do not entirely occupy the visual frame. The production forces consideration of what is necessary to get the job of filming done, but also allows for time to think through aspects of a world quite different from the present of the 1960s — such as optical storage for computers of the future, or the kinds of materials that might be used for spacecraft, or the small curiosities of routine earth-to- moon space shuttling, or what companies and brands may exist 30 years in the future.

Despite what one might think about the drama or the pacing or the story of 2001, it is worth considering, especially in the context of “design fiction” for its production practices and its approach to thinking-through a possible future. Collapsing science fact together with science fiction to sketch out this trajec- tory is perhaps the only sensible way to create such a compelling vision whilst on the historical cusp of that vision coming into being.