Design Fiction

You are on chapter // 06 Conclusion

After this twisty romp it’s time to ask – so..(now) what? That’s a good ques- tion. A brief recap first.

I started with the word “design.” I was wondering how and why the word itself seemed to hold a latent potential to transform existing practices beyond their conservative sensibilities? How does design add, or try to add, or hold for the possibility that it can add a layer of unorthodox creativity to, for example, something like finance? Is this a cultural fluke? A sign of the times? Is the phenomenon of things becoming hyphenated with “design” similar to the way “engineering” or “networked” or “interactive” gets bolted onto just about everything?
So long as design is malleable in this way, I proposed “design fiction” in order to think about how design can tell thoughtful, speculative stories through objects. Even though I was doing my own bit of linguistic bolt- ing-on, I decided on fiction not so much to create objects that are for story telling, but to create objects that help think through matters-of-concern. I am interested in working through materialized thought experiments. Design fictions are propositions for new, future things done as physical instantia- tions rather than future project plans done through PowerPoint. There are stories, of course. Stories with objects; stories embedded within objects. They surround the object, without drawing undue attention to it. Like the role a prop performs in the telling of a story: it’s not there for itself, it’s there to move the story forward. And if we’re trying to imagine new, more habitable future worlds, we need stories that help anchor those worlds in a shared imaginary. Stories with something to ‘grab hold of’ are better, more compelling; they get the makers and craftspeople behind it. That is the role design fiction objects play. They help move these stories forward, adding consistency, continuity, and a set of indices – things to point to and ponder. They are the things that stand in for that future and refer us to it. They help us imagine. In order for this perspective of design fiction to work out, it is necessary to consider that it has nothing to do with any kind of instrumental activity that fits simply and neatly in connected boxes of process flows for manu- facturing things. It’s more than just surfacing, or detailing, or putting ma- chined and milled boxes around engineered functionality. This is the same as saying that design fiction (or design, broadly as far as I understand it) is not the last thing that happens before an engineered device is ready for the world outside of the laboratory. What I’m saying can be summed up neatly: Engineering makes things for end-users. Accounting makes things for markets, demographics and con- sumers. Design makes things for people. Pick your practice. Claim your pri- orities.
So, long as design is a way of thinking through questions and problems, and provoking by “hitting raw nerves” [Stefano Mirti]; and so long as design is a way of moving “upstream and not waiting for science to become technology and then products” [Anthony Dunne]; and so long as design can create things that will be different from the conservative, old-fashioned, clearly broken continuity models of the future (‘up, and to the right’ graphs), or William Gibson’s distribution-spread model of the future (“the future is here, just not evenly distributed”) — what kind of stories about the future might design tell? If these criteria could be achieved through a genre of story telling, what genre might it be? It would not be the only possible genre of course. It would be one that can help imagine some of the props that help materialize that near future, outline its properties, tell its stories, and so on. My conclusion is that it would be science fiction, largely because that’s an imaginative, aspirational style of story telling. It speculates about possible future worlds. The more specific genre known as near future science fiction is particularly promising. It extrapolates from today in a legible way in that it is generally easier to imagine things extending from now into that near future imaginary, rather than wholly anchor-less speculations that are incon- sistent with the logics of today. (The kind of design I’m talking about is trying to determine with any cer- tainty what will happen in the future. That’s just silly. We’re not interested in modeling behavior and saying with any sort of certainty or predictability what will happen. What design fiction is after is thinking through possible near futures based on a willfulness to create different worlds, perhaps more habitable, mindful of all the good things for which one might strive.)
Why the near future? Why any future? Because we’re trying to create new things forward from today, but we’re not willing to wait on the usual ways in which the future obtains. The future is not only an advancement of technical prowess, or discovery of new and peculiar subatomic particles. The future is not defined by the capacity to travel in space. There are other kinds of futures and other aspirations for dif- ferent kinds of worlds. Those other kinds of worlds are ones that engineering and technology and science — the practice idioms that conventionally hold sway over what sorts of future worlds come to pass — these disciplines may not be best equipped to imagine on their own, or from the basis of the kinds of epistemologies that undergird these endeavors.
This said, the question now is – how can you get to the near future through design? One possible approach is to knit together science, fact and fiction. Why science fact and science fiction? They are two forms of knowledge making and knowledge circulation that have a strong stake in making new possible near future worlds. Not all science fact is about the near future, but enough is. Perhaps the more prag- matic sort of science fact that is close enough in its matters-of-concern to help out in any worldly crisis. Neither is all science fiction about the near future, but there is some that is specifically about the near future, and so that’s good enough for me. Bringing science fact and science fiction together allows us to let go of rigid, unyielding adherence to fixed “proprietary” processes. It lets go of con- straints on the imagination often disguised as such by calling them “prac- ticalities.” It is an approach that finds ways to tell speculative stories un- hindered by notions of future prediction, or interpretations of focus group rationales, or markets demands, or end-users (whoever those are.) For all of its efforts, and all of its chaste, modest and well-heeled demean- or, science fact does a horrible job of circulating knowledge. In an open era, where the networks and mechanisms for sharing and imagining together are all in place and in their early days of producing large, productive “network effects” through sharing, this is inexcusable. Even worse, science fact cannot tell a decent story about the future to save itself, let alone anyone else. Science fiction does a much better job of circulating futures and enrolling people in the possibilities, and does so to the degree that things begin to happen on that basis alone. This is what matters and why fact and fiction need to come together in a coherent way. It’s not the ideas of scientists in a lab that matter, but what people (not “end-users”; not “consumers”; not even “productive consumers”) can contribute and add to their social prac- tices, their interaction rituals, their lives and the possibilities for re-imagin- ing and remaking those lives for the better. It’s not easy, and not trivial, and there’s no handbook on how to do it. It happens along the frontier outposts with things like maker communities with their DIY sensibilities. This is something takes visionary story tellers and visionary makers and willing col- laborators who want to make frighteningly new experiences more than they want to make money.
What I had to do was show that fact and fiction do indeed routinely swap properties. Why did I have to demonstrate this? Because revealing the ways this property swapping happens reveals the force of both kinds of science to re-imagine the future as something differ- ent from today, and different from the conventions of what today imag- ines the future to be. This is what I was doing as part of this idea of creat- ing things that “start and circulate conversation” about what can be(come). I had to do this because I wanted to implicate material practices into the analysis. It’s not so much that this property swapping happens. What is also important is how to do this in such a way as to make the conversations that yield material of some sort — objects, stories and that kind of thing to help move those conversations around. Making prototypes by themselves is not enough. Prototypes are coherent functionality, but they lack a visionary story about what makes them conversant on important matters-of-concern. Props help move stories along, so there’s something promising about them. My colleague David A. Kirby is onto something when he digs deep into this idea of the “diegetic prototype”: …cinematic depictions of future technologies are actually “diegetic proto- types” that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability. Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical ad- vantage even over true prototypes: in the [story] these technologies exist as “real” objects that function properly and which people actually use. These kinds of prototypes, enabled by story, enlivened by a drama of some sort — they actually have advantage over fussy fully functional engineered prototypes. This is important and part of the sharing/swapping of proper- ties in that both props of the kind that “diegetic prototype” implies, and prototypes of the more conventional variety can do something together that neither can do alone. I brought up a few examples, including some brief sidebars to help draw out some of the contours around this idea that fact and fiction swap proper- ties. The big example of property swapping was between Ubicomp and Minority Report. I relied on Philip K. Dick, Paul Dourish, Mark Weiser, Steven Spielberg and Genevieve Bell to demonstrate how they (and everyone else involved) were all simultaneously doing work together to create near future worlds that are ubiquitously computational and networked to the gills. All the endeavors were mutually supportive and benefited each other to the extent that these future imaginaries became fruitfully entangled. We can’t imagine that world without constructing a variety of conclusions to Ubicomp — pretty, comical, happy, dark, disastrous. You just don’t know, and you can’t know if you give up on the possible multiple futures that are just as valid as the merry “up-and-to-the-right” future, or the gradual dis- tribution-of-Ubicomp future goodness from the digerati out to the proles, eager for their self-shopping refrigerators. I looked briefly at Star Trek and the fascinating world of fan-art that delves deep and creates components and props that were never there in the first place and then circulate back to fill and patch-in the story. 2001: A Space Odyssey reveals the intricate process of making the near future of 2001 when seen from the late 1960s. The film production was as much a futur- ist society as any at the time, involving technologists and scientists who were wondering the same things as Kubrick and Clarke, and working passionate- ly on the same question. Together, they didn’t just work on a science fiction story, they were making science fictions based on the properties of science fact, and therein was this property swapping, back and forth. There were other examples along the way, but those were the big ones. The others were meant to reveal other instances whereby fact and fiction swap properties as they help us imagine what the future might look like and how we might create or avert particular kinds of futures. They are provocations in this way, designed and built to think things through. There are plenty of other fun, useful, design fiction examples. In “Ubik” P.K. Dick describes money-grubbing ubiquitously networked apartment doors that threaten to sue you if you try and undo their mechanism. This is the only reasonable conclusion to Ubicomp visions of the future when you factor in what smart warning labels and avatar-based end-user license agreements will sound and act like in 30 years. Bruce Sterling’s novel “Distraction”contains the idea of a “reputation server” — a kind of near future conclusion to the irrelevance of credit as a measure of one’s worth, and the complete collapse of trust in institutions. Individual and peer reputation matters more than money in Sterling’s near future. If you’re curious about the conclusion to all this Twitter mishegoss, read Sterling’s Maneki Neko, a short story that prototypes the near future of a combination of location awareness, Google Analytics, network effects and the “gift economy.”So, what? Why does all of this matter? It all matters because we care about imagining and materializing future habitable worlds. We care so much that finding effective mechanisms for creating these more habitable worlds really is our concern. Smart, creative, imaginative ways of linking ideas to their materialization really do matter, because the future matters, and we will use whatever means possible to do create these better worlds, including the si- multaneous deployment of science, fact, fiction and design.

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