The future will be boring. TBD.
February 5, 2016 1:50 PM   Subscribe

What is Design Fiction?
"the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very seriously about potential objects and services and trying to get people to concentrate on those rather than entire worlds or political trends or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories." — Bruce Sterling
Examples of Diegetic Prototypes in Design Fiction.

For a deeper dive, enjoy A Design Fiction Evening with Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, James Bridle, Cliff Kuang and Scott Paterson. (video of three 20 min talks + 30 min discussion)
We met to talk about design. And fiction. And the ways of approaching the challenge of all challenges, whatever it may be. We talked about expressing the opportunities those challenges raise as distinctly new tangible forms. As well as the essential value of mundane design. We talked about clarifying the present. We talked about designing the future. And doing both of these things with design. And fiction.
posted by iamkimiam (13 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
This sounds like it has less to do with science fiction than advertising. If you can make a buck giving TED talks about products that would be neat but don't exist, good on you, I guess. Some chimera mashup of Elon Musk and Don Draper is someone I can only imagine I would find personally insufferable, but we're only just-supposing his/her existence anyway, so.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:04 PM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


Why Apple Doesn't Do Concept Products: "Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products."
posted by growli at 2:28 PM on February 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very seriously

I am kind of entertained by what I can really only describe as a kind of confidence trick being played here with "diegesis." You start with a dignified-sounding Greek word with a completely straightforward narratological meaning, but then periphrastically blow it up into a deliberately fuzzy, mystified, profound-sounding technical term because it's a performance pitched to an audience with no background in the humanities. It's a way of selling fiction's seriousness to (and in the language of) salespeople, I guess, redesigning and advertising it as a technical thing to designers and advertisers.
posted by RogerB at 2:48 PM on February 5, 2016 [13 favorites]


"Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products."

Can someone please tell the architects
posted by doobiedoo at 3:15 PM on February 5, 2016


I don't care that this frequently finds a home in marketing BS. I hate marketing BS, but I really like the freedom of imagining - "what would that look like?"

It reminds me of the magazines from 100 years ago where people talked about what they thought things would look like today. Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about politics and society, but I also spend a lot of time interacting with stuff. I like stuff. stuff is cool. Future stuff is cool, too.
posted by rebent at 4:00 PM on February 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


I thought "The Social Web of Things" (first video on the Design Fiction link) was really sad! :'( I don't want my house to be the one giving me a warm welcome.

But generally really fun to speculate about these things!
posted by k8bot at 4:41 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Futurist have their last night of whimsy before VR arrives and changes everything.

I think there is a certain timing in this. With the impending release of affordable and high quality consumer grade VR equipment; we are about to enter a new era and things are going to get weird.

As far as diegetic, you aint seen nothing yet. I have no doubt that fiction and concept are going to completely eat the world for the next decade. We will look back on posts like this and think; they had an inkling but really ... they had no idea what was coming.
posted by vicx at 6:00 PM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Fusion's just around the corner too.
posted by Artw at 6:02 PM on February 5, 2016 [8 favorites]


Science fiction should succeed entirely on the power of its ideas, not on trying to fool people into believing it already exists. If an idea is good enough, it will invoke its own solution through the longing of its readers. There are people now who have spent their entire careers trying to bring about the realization of the satellite, the spacecraft, the AI, cyberspace, the sonic screwdriver, the warp drive, the tricorder, the teleporter, the aleph, and a just and inclusive society.
posted by newdaddy at 9:32 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I feel like I've done this topic a disservice by not placing 'A Design Fiction Evening' as the main link — I think the 3 talks are academic yet accessible, addressing many of the concerns mentioned in the comments so far. I'd like to have a go at highlighting some of those points, if that's all right.

I felt like the meaning, aptness and utility of 'diegetic prototype' is fairly well argued at 7:00 into Bleecker's talk, where he discusses David Kirby's intention and use of the phrase. Bleecker gives some examples of these prototypes in sci-fi films past and present and goes on to explain how if we accept the existence of these things in the context of the film, the design fiction — the story around these objects — then becomes all the ways we might interact with the prototype, how it is interwoven in our everyday experiences, what the UI acts and looks like, etc.

In the next talk, Industrial Designer Nick Foster takes the idea further and discusses how our perception of these prototypes as 'authentic' and this near future as 'realistic' is tied to how we describe that fiction in terms of everyday designs, what he coins 'The Future Mundane' (26:30 in the video). Particularly at 29:00 in, he describes how the Future Mundane is an accretive space — that technology builds up in an accretive way; humans are sentimental, messy, emotional and all of our technologies and things stack up on top of each other; the old shit doesn't just go away in preference for a singular, futurist aesthetic. Also, these prototypes will have flaws as they integrate with our near future world — he gives great examples of these prototype flaws at 32:05, 32:45, 33:45 and 35:40. These are the 'design fictions' — it's not a genre, it is the world that exists around a design, and the depiction of that world in some medium.

James Bridle takes all of this in a slightly different direction, talking about these design fictions that are already woven into our everyday experience but are somewhat invisible, therefore shaping his interpretation of the everyday 'mundane'. He gives examples of these at 38:40, 39:42, 41:43 and 43:25 and 45:48. Through his work, he is adding to the already existing fiction, but explaining the important and currently invisible part of the story. Although he also says that "rendering something as visible is not nearly [doing] enough." And so his solution to this is to not only make these things visible, but drawing attention to them, and making their story legible to others. He gives several examples of ways to make design legible. The bit at 54:39 shows how architectural designers in Helsinki were tasked with the challenge of designing an ecologically-sound building and discovered that they could successfully achieve this by changing the law — that is, by treating the law as the code with which to work with, that reasoned advancement could shape the future not just for them, but for all builders moving forward. This last example is particularly interesting to me, because I think it speaks to his concluding points where he suggests that our job as designers is to take the little bits of 'future' that is already here and around us and describe it better, make it legible, and optimise it.

Sorry to ramble on here, especially in my own post. I feel bad about the way I've framed this — thinking that putting all the entertaining sci-fi and advertising video examples up front would make a fun way in for others. But now I wonder if that has just misplaced the focus on design fiction as a genre such as sci-fi, or as means to a perhaps shallow end, such as advertising. To me its something else entirely, and has given me some language with which to identify and talk about seamless examples of design fictions (e.g., the cereal box in Minority Report) as well as incongruous or absurd ones (8-sided paper in Battlestar Galactica). And so I'm curious about others' interpretations of what design fiction is here. And perhaps examples they've spotted, because (as others have said above) that's really fun to think about!
posted by iamkimiam at 1:32 PM on February 6, 2016 [6 favorites]


iamkimiam: I enjoyed the post and got a lot out of it, taking it in the framing as something positive rather than some hollow esoteric diversion or advercrap.

Asking people to change their minds is challenging. Presenting examples of things that could help them understand the possibility of change, and why they would even start thinking about changing their minds, is valuable. I work in education and I fight change resistance daily. I no longer get hung up in presenting yet more evidence that people won't bother to read or will devalue automatically, I present examples of where we could be. I tell stories to show them the path. Until I read this, I didn't realise that what I was doing had the name of design fiction. This has been very helpful for me.

Thank you for posting this. I think that there's more than enough here for people to learn from if they choose to read all of the links.
posted by nfalkner at 7:55 PM on February 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


Thanks, nfalkner! Those are really helpful insights, especially the part about presenting examples of where we could be. I like that way of describing the process.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:13 AM on February 7, 2016


I guess if I misunderstood the aim of this post, I apologize. I do see nfalkner's point about the object, or the CGIing of an object, being a prompt for discussion or thinking about what its interfaces could be, how people could interact with it.

On the other hand, I do fairly often see advertisements, in trade magazines (like EETimes) and elsewhere that either ride the hairy edge of what is possible, or smear it entirely. And I do remember a TV ad (during a Superbowl?) depicting the paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve walking again - presumably through the application of some technology or medical technique yet to be developed - and I thought this was fairly horrible, though I'm sure his own intentions must have been good. I felt like this was a betrayal, and hopelessly misleading to people with a similar circumstance. So I feel like the ability to mock up something imaginary like this is certainly open to abuse, as is mostly everything else.
posted by newdaddy at 6:56 PM on February 9, 2016


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