Design Fiction

You are on chapter // 03 Fact and Fiction Swap Properties

Insights into how fact and fiction are all tangled up, anyway.

As a principle, the science of facts and the science of fictions have their own distinctive characteristics which helps draw hard boundaries between the one and the other. But, in practice (which is what really matters when things are made), these two genres of science are quite tangled together. There are knots of intermingling ideas, aspirations and objects that blur any perceived boundaries and bind together these two kinds of science together. Engaging these knots, making the knots deliberately — this is the practice of design fiction.

Design fiction happens when you tie together fact and fiction and play comfortably and happily in the between. In between face and fiction is where designed fictions are most active. Designed fictions are the result of tensions that arises from being in a bit of a muddle, neither firmly staking yourself on the side of fact, nor on the side of fiction. Designed fictions are projections and extrapolations meant to explore possible near futures. They are speculations on what the next “now” will be like, always remembering no possible future is out of the question. The only caveat is that extrapolat- ing through designed fictions into the near future are certainly not along the tired old future projection graphs that always seem to run up and to the right — always smaller, faster, cheaper, brighter. Design based on this set of principles are optimistic and hopeful, but also naive and uncritical. They don’t expect anything except continuity. There are no disruptions in this kind of fantasy future. The “up and to the right” futures never last too long. There are no continuities. We are looking to explore inspired alternatives to this lack of imagination.

In this one small instance I am proposing that this knotting action — the tying together of fact and fiction — become a deliberate, conscientious, named part of the design practice, rather than something to be avoided or hidden after things are done. Revel in the messiness, the speculation, and the confusion that arises when you don’t play by the old rules of the ratio- nal, modern world. Create the “action” of speculation and fiction-making as part of the design practice. Throw out the silly sober “proprietary processes” that every design/creative/engineering practice claims, and that ultimately lead to the same old conclusions anyway. Look for innovation by playing against conservative rules that shape now bankrupt commodity markets of uninspired, throw-away designs, and barely habitable near futures.

The unusual, unexpected, multiple near futures that sustain not only the ecological earth but the emerging socially networked and connected earth are especially in need of a more active voice, if only to create an alternative to the programmed myth that there is only one future on the flat graph that goes up and to the right — or that there is only one future that only takes time to distribute evenly.

Rather than concerning ourselves only with the conclusions of design fiction, lets look where it happens, in the entanglements before things are worked out and given a gloss. Before the end is the messy middle bits, when things seem as though they’ll never get finished. The conclusion — the finish — almost always hides the struggle for completion. The end results
of evolving an idea into a material form are only the final punctuation to a longer muddle in which ideas and their object-proxies struggle to express themselves against other inconsonant ideas and object-proxies. It’s very much something one might call “political” the way a design — the knot of all the work that goes into making the thing — achieves its conclusion. With design fiction, you begin to find lots of bastard ideas; lots of “memes” with rather muddled origin stories, many of which find their earliest expres- sions in science fiction, as it turns out.

Where do you look for the practice, the actual struggle that reveals the more interesting activity of humans willing a future into existence? It all happens where ideas swap properties, becoming in their way the material thing. A mess is made of previously well-disciplined, coherent categories of ideas. Tracing the knots illuminates certain aspects of a design fiction exer- cise. You notice an idea from science fiction cohere as science fact, or a spec- ulation that would be difficult to categorize as science fact has found its way into a bit of near future science fiction that then becomes more widely cir- culated than if it had remained an utterance within an obscure professional science society journal.

Design fiction is somewhere in the space between the science of fact and the science of fiction, which is, I’m suggesting, where the science work all happens anyway. The fact and fiction are extremes — these are really not much more than far-away anchor points where no one really works. We’re always only ever in between. There is no fact without also spending some time speculating in a fictional mode, asking the “what if..?” questions. Any good science fiction practitioner will spend time with those who consider themselves to be working in the science fact idiom, and everyone’s happy to learn from each other, activating their imaginations in ways that are reflect- ed in the film, or book or as scribbles on the white board or cobbled togeth- er “prototypes” on the lab bench. Science fact and science fiction are there as waypoints and references that people can claim to help them describe to others what they do. Science fact and science fiction provide a list of charac- teristic properties that simplify the problem of organizing and categorizing specific well-bounded kinds of cultural production.

People who claim science fact as the practice idiom in which they do their work would never really say they do not imagine things beyond “fact.” Certainly they enter into a sort of science fiction, which they might describe as speculating and “brainstorming.” This is a kind of science fiction that is made legitimate by calling its result hypotheticals, or by explaining these speculations as “theoretical prototypes”, or “just ideas” as if to say, “I know this is silly and not really possible, nevertheless..” These are explanations that are like perimeter alarms going off around disciplinary turf, indicating that we’re beginning to breech the hard, well-policed border between the proper work of science fact and the murky terrain of science fiction.

In the same way, most any science fiction author would never say they do not allow the influence of science fact to enter into their imagination, shaping and informing the stories they write. I should note that science fiction has a genre identifier for their “hypothetical” idiom — hard science fiction, where “hard” refers to rigor, the hard-set of scientific principles to support the accuracy of any science content within the story. Hard science fiction is the perimeter alarm from the other side, as science fiction incur- sions make basis its fiction-world epistemologies on science fact.

This terrain “claiming”, whether fact from fiction, or fiction from fact
is where the two science genres swap properties. The science happens in between the fact and the fiction, between the extremities. Across the borders set up to partition disciplines is where design fiction lives, sharing and bor- rowing and swapping properties from fact and fiction, intermingling and generally making a hash of things.

We can say that the idea that science fact and science fiction intermingle
is not something terribly new, although it can be an unsettling idea. After all, facts are facts and fiction — well, that’s something you concern your- self with to unwind after the hard work of, say, detecting elusive elementary particles with multi-billion dollar data filters and data collectors called super colliders. No one wants to say that the laws of aerodynamics are based in science fiction, and do so right before you get on an airplane. But, really — any science is always a bit of speculation, hope, imagination and self-assured declarations. It is as if science fiction is the imagination and science fact is the conclusion to this imagining. Science fact is where science fiction ideas go to become material things.

It so happens that I can’t help but dig deeper into this interrelationship between science fact and science fiction. It’s part of a larger project to under- stand how culture circulates, especially the formation of ideas, knowledge and their object proxies. Which ideas get to circulate out in the world and why? How do ideas obtain their “mass” and accumulate attention and con- versation or become sidelined and obsolete The larger project is especially about understanding the mechanisms by which material and ideas swap properties, which is why I want to understand and do design.

At this point, for this topic of design fiction, I’m inclined to a bit more analysis, perhaps because I’m intrigued by the muddle of anything hybrid, which I see in this undisciplinary mix of design, science, fact and fiction. The longer bit of this essay to follow is an exploration of the ways that science fact and science fiction get all tangled up, creating a knot of knowl- edge and its circulation through larger meaning-making assemblages. It’s an exploration of how the science of fact and the science of fiction blur togeth- er in practice, always. Rather than focusing on this in a pedantic way, I am doing it to better understand how undisciplined property swapping amongst science fact and science fiction can yield an exciting form of design work that involves thinking, crafting, speculating and imagining.

I am going to start with one simple but rich example of this property swapping. The example is meant to show a bit of design fiction in action through the film Minority Report. Two things I attempt to draw out in this example.

The first is the strength of a good story in contributing to the design fiction process. What I mean to do in this example is to highlight how good ideas circulate well when they have a story to go along with them, and a story that is about more than a gadget. In fact, remove the gadget all togeth- er and make it a story about people and the timelessness of human funda- mental social practices. Then put the gadget back in, as a prop, that helps move the story along. Objects themselves, which are never devoid of context even if it is something we only imagine and place around the object to give it meaning. A particularly rich context, a good story that involves people and their social practices rather than fetishizing the object and its imag- ined possibilities — this is what design fiction aspires to. And in the film Minority Report, I find that this is done particularly well.

The “gadgets” in the P.K. Dick / Spielberg / Cruise future of 2054 are not fetishized as things-in-themselves. They are not the perfection one might of them if they were advertised as the next great thing, which is an idiom of design-marketing meant to play to ones gullibility and expectations of in- creasing utility and perfection as if, in this next new gadget from industry, all of the problems that the previous gadget had will finally be worked out.

Rather the Minority Report props are instruments that ultimately become expressions of human fallibility and hubris. They aren’t primarily useful as design ideas for future technologies — although they are often received as such, and every advantage. Instead, and in their most useful mode as design fiction objects, they serve to incite conversations that are more cautionary than aspirational.

The second feature of the Minority Part analysis is the property swapping between science makers and film makers whereby the film production deploys researchers and thinkers to consider facets of 2054 that are extrapo- lations and speculations from the present. Simultaneously, researchers and thinkers deploy the film’s production to consider facets of 2054 that are ex- trapolations and speculations from the present. The knots that entangle film fiction and design-technology fact are an instance of a kind of design fiction.

While a restless graduate student at the University of Washington I worked at a place called the Human Interface Technology Lab, or HITLab. The lab was working quite hard on virtual reality (VR), another (again) of a kind of immersive, 3D environment that, today, one might experience as something like Second Life. The technology had a basic instrumental archetype canonized in a pair of $250,000 machines (one for each eyeball) called, appropriately, the RealityEngine. With video head mount that looked like a scuba-mask, one could experi- ence a kind of digital virtual world environment that was exciting for what it suggested for the future, but very rough and sparse in its ex- ecution. As I was new to the new HITLab (still in temporary trailers on a muddy slope by the campus’ steam plant), I went through the infor- mal socialization rituals of acquainting myself to the other members of the team — and to the idioms by which the lab shared its collec- tive imaginary about what exactly was going on here, and what was VR. Anything that touches the word “reality” needs some pretty fleet- footed references to help describe what’s going on, and a good set of anchor points so one can do the indexical language trick of “it’s like that thing in..” For the HITLab, the closest we got to a shared technical manual was William Gibson’s”Neuromancer” which I was encouraged to read closely before I got too far involved and risked the chance of being left out of the conversations that equated what we were making with Gibson’s “Cyberspace Deck”, amongst other science fiction props. I mean — that’s what we said. There was no irony. It was the reference point. I’m serious. I mean..this is from a paper that Randy Walser from Autodesk wrote at this same time, when VR was going to fix everything:

“In William Gibson’s stories starting with Neuromancer, people use an instrument called a “deck” to “jack” into cyberspace. The instrument that Gibson describes is small enough to fit in a drawer, and directly stim- ulates the human nervous system. While Gibson’s vision is beyond the reach of today’s technology, it is nonetheless possible, today, to achieve many of the effects to which Gibson alludes. A number of companies and organizations are actively developing the essential elements of a cyberspace deck (though not everyone has adopted the term “deck”). These groups include NASA, University of North Carolina, University of Washington, Artificial Reality Corp., VPL Research, and Autodesk, along with numerous others who are starting new R&D programs.”

Shortly after the HITLab, a number of us formed a company called World Design where we meant to continue our speculations about what “virtual worlds” technology could do in a commercial context. There’s a larger story there, perhaps. But the more curious fact to note is that our corporate bard was an informal ally from the neighborhood of ideas who also lived nearby in Seattle, Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author of Snowcrash. Stephenson’s science fiction, like that of Rucker, Gibson’s and Sterling’s, our other cyberpunk heros, were as much design and stye manuals as they were entertaining literature.

Except for the overdose of hubris — which you just have to take with every bit of new technoscience that’s trying to sell its near future self — there’s nothing wrong with this discursive slip-and-slide that entan- gles science fact and science fiction. It’s all good stuff. It’s part of the practice of design fiction. The knitting together of fiction and reality, ideas and their materialization happens because of the powerful lan- guage objects found in the science fiction. Just as quickly, the “reality” circulates back into the science fiction.

Each kind of science provides for the other the indices and anchor points necessary to tell the story of this near future vision of VR, which real companies with mostly real funding sources were cobbling togeth- er. The objects that authors like William Gibson craft through words are kinds of designed objects that help fill out the vision, inciting con- versations, providing backdrops, set pieces and props. The Cyberspace Deck. Gibson wrote about it and it had a story that was compelling enough that it may as well be built. The written objects creates a goal line, a critical path toward the successful completion of the VR mythos. Together, the linkages that connect fact and fiction are ways of filling in that shared imaginary, which then knits the social formations of everyone and everything together.

Bruno Latour would remind us that this is the socialization of objects. Technology is precisely the socialization of ideas via object proxies. You don’t need to look much further than this VR anecdote to appreciate how technology is always already the assemblage of social practices. It happens in the circulation of ideas and stories that draw in a multitude of perspectives, and ways of expressing the imagination, from circuit diagrams to galactic adventures.

Speculative modeling and speculative design are practices that create for the purposes of reflection and conversation. Things are made — objects, films — anything really that can provoke the imagination and extend conventional wisdom into new considerations that are unex- pected or counter to prevailing.