Design fiction

Futures studies
Concepts
Techniques
Technology assessment and forecasting
Related topics

Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures[1][2] by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts. It is a way to facilitate and foster debates, as explained by futurist Scott Smith: "... design fiction as a communication and social object creates interactions and dialogues around futures that were missing before. It helps make it real enough for people that you can have a meaningful conversation with".[3]

By inspiring new imaginaries about the future, Design Fiction moves forward innovation perspectives, as conveyed by author Bruce Sterling's own definition: "Design Fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change".[4]

Reflecting the diversity of media used to create design fictions and the breadth of concepts that are prototyped in the associated fictional worlds, researchers Joseph Lindley and Paul Coulton propose that design fiction be defined as: "(1) something that creates a story world, (2) has something being prototyped within that story world, (3) does so in order to create a discursive space", where 'something' may mean 'anything'.[5] Examples of the media used to create design fiction storyworlds include physical prototypes,[6][7] prototypes of user manuals,[8][9] digital applications,[10][11] videos,[12][13][14] short stories,[15][16] comics,[17][18][19] fictional crowdfunding videos,[20] fictional documentaries,[21][22] catalogues[23] or newspapers[24] and pastiches of academic papers and abstracts.[25][26][27][28]

  1. ^ Dunne, Anthony; Raby, Fiona (2013). Speculative Everything. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262019842.
  2. ^ "Definition of speculative design". Auger Loizeau: Blog. Retrieved 2016-07-05.
  3. ^ Smith, Scott (2016). "Insights: Scott Smith". Medium. Design Friction.
  4. ^ Sterling, Bruce (October 2013). "Patently untrue: fleshy defibrillators and synchronised baseball are changing the future". Wired.
  5. ^ Lindley, Joseph; Coulton, Paul (2015-01-01). "Back to the future". Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference (PDF). British HCI '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 210–211. doi:10.1145/2783446.2783592. ISBN 9781450336437. S2CID 6898198.
  6. ^ Superflux (2015). "DRONE AVIARY".
  7. ^ "N O R M A L S — A P P A R E L". normalfutu.re. Retrieved 2019-11-10.
  8. ^ The Near Future Laboratory. "Helios Quick Start Guide".
  9. ^ Design Friction (2015). "Euthanasia Wearable Quick Start Guide" (PDF). Imagination Lancaster. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-15. Retrieved 2017-09-04.
  10. ^ Automato Farm (2014). "Ethical Autonomous Vehicles".
  11. ^ Hopfengärtner, Bernd; N O R M A L S (18 October 2019). "Molecular Futures — VR App for exploring 5 scenarios". Vimeo.
  12. ^ Joe Lindley (2014-10-30), A Machine. Learning. (An example of HCI prototyping with design fiction), retrieved 2016-07-05
  13. ^ "A Digital Tomorrow". Vimeo. Retrieved 2016-07-05.
  14. ^ "Uninvited Guests | superflux". superflux.in. Archived from the original on 2016-07-18. Retrieved 2016-07-05.
  15. ^ Maughan, Tim (2013-09-19). "Zero Hours".
  16. ^ Dalton, Nicholas S.; Moreau, Rebecca; Adams, Ross K. (2016-01-01). "Resistance is Fertile". Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (PDF) (Submitted manuscript). CHI EA '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 365–374. doi:10.1145/2851581.2892572. ISBN 9781450340823. S2CID 30925626.
  17. ^ Michon, Aurélien R. (2014). N O R M A L S 001 + 002 + 003. Normals. ISBN 978-2-9545994-0-3. Retrieved 2017-01-12. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  18. ^ Sturdee, Miriam; Coulton, Paul; Lindley, Joseph G.; Stead, Mike; Ali, Haider; Hudson-Smith, Andy (2016-01-01). "Design Fiction". Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (PDF). CHI EA '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 375–386. doi:10.1145/2851581.2892574. ISBN 9781450340823. S2CID 6532763.
  19. ^ "Emotion detector could reveal if a date really finds you attractive: Is this the kind of world we actually want?". www.sciencedaily.com. Retrieved 2016-07-05.
  20. ^ "Introducing the Empathy Engine". Vimeo. Retrieved 2016-07-05.
  21. ^ "A P P A R E L by N O R M A L S". normalfutu.re. Archived from the original on 2019-11-09. Retrieved 2017-01-12.
  22. ^ Joe Lindley (2015-08-11), Care For a Robot (A design fiction documentary about caring robots), retrieved 2016-07-05
  23. ^ Near Future Laboratory (2014). "The catalog of the near future's normal ordinary everyday".
  24. ^ Near Future Laboratory (2014). "Winning Formula".
  25. ^ Lindley, Joseph; Coulton, Paul (2015-01-01). "Game of Drones". Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (PDF). CHI PLAY '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 613–618. doi:10.1145/2793107.2810300. ISBN 9781450334662. S2CID 1406799.
  26. ^ Lindley, Joseph; Coulton, Paul (2016-01-01). "Pushing the Limits of Design Fiction". Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (PDF). CHI '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 4032–4043. doi:10.1145/2858036.2858446. ISBN 9781450333627. S2CID 13454930.
  27. ^ Blythe, Mark; Buie, Elizabeth (2014-01-01). "Chatbots of the gods". Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational. NordiCHI '14. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 227–236. doi:10.1145/2639189.2641212. ISBN 9781450325424. S2CID 21724519.
  28. ^ Blythe, Mark (2014-01-01). "Research through design fiction". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '14. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 703–712. doi:10.1145/2556288.2557098. ISBN 9781450324731. S2CID 207210135.