Designer, Technologist and Researcher Julian Bleecker of The Near Future Laboratory has just published an essay titled Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. [PDF] in which he argues that that “Fiction is evolutionarily valuable because it allows low-cost experimentation compared to trying things for real.”

This was published as a response to the similarly-themed paper by Paul Douris and Genevieve Bell, “Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing. Explaining the rationale for his response, Julian says:

Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called “design fiction” that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.

Julian continues to explain how science fiction and design are related thought-experiments…

Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It’s about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.

This is all very cool stuff. The essay itself talks about ubiquitous computing and coming up with ways of removing design/thought contraints, thus freeing the imagination and realizing practical yet imaginative solutions to a near-future world. It talks about how fact and fiction become intertwined and “swap properties”. The essay call out Minority Report (one of my favorite films) and the “gesture interface” as an example, showing how the ideas revolve around one another and feed off each other, thus producing that reality.

It’s a real interesting essay. Wanna expand your mind? Go read it.

[via Core77]

Related posts:

  1. The Future of Science Fiction TV is NOT the Sci Fi Channel
  2. What Happened to the Future that Science Fiction Promised Us?
  3. MIND MELD: The Future of Written Science Fiction
  4. New Issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction
  5. 18 Non-Fiction Essays by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers

Filed under: Science and Technology

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