Unfinished Business Design Fiction Lecture @ OCAD

Design Fiction:
Provoking the Future by Making It
Scott Smith
Changeist
Unfinished Business Lecture @ OCAD U
September 29, 2010
#designfiction
www.changeist.com

About Me

Design
Foresight
Strategy

How do design, our imagination and science fiction interact?

Made in 1967, from 1963 novel La Planète des Singes by Pierre Boulle

Made in 1971, from 1954 novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

PADD, Star Trek Next Generation

That’s all nice, but how do we make the future happen more often?

Fact
Histories
Signals
Future
Past
Myths
Scenarios
Fiction

Brain Centers

People who could touch something, instead of just hear or read about it, were 50% more likely to select the “experienced” item.
— Caltech research

What’s Design Fiction got to do with it?

Design fiction attempts “to correct for the limitations in how we think about the future”.
Jake Dunagan, Institute for the Future

“…Science fiction
does not merely
anticipate but actively shapes technological futures through its effect
on the collective
imagination.”
-Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell,
“Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing

“Design seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls—scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design.”
-Bruce Sterling, Interactions magazine,
May/June 2009

“How can design participate in
shaping possible near future worlds?
How can the integration of story telling,
technology, art and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future?
How does the material act of making and crafting things— real, material objects — shape how we think about what is possible and how we think about what should be possible?”
-Julian Bleecker, Near Future Laboratory

Design and Existential Risk: http://designexrisk.wordpress.com/

≠
We can’t keep trying to rewrite the script to make our desired endings come true (good or bad). If we have our own points of view—if we OWN the future—we can use our powers of synthesis to keep rewriting and rethinking these style manuals, and make new artifacts to test their physics.

Globalization
The Long Boom
Hard Times
High
Growth
Low
Growth
Divided World
Perfect Storm
Fragmentation

ACTIVE
FUTURES
=

Fringe, Season Two

The Other Side
Our Side

Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, Found Futures Project

www.the-salvare.com.

BERG London http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/12/the-ghost-in-the-field/

Prototyping around unknown needs and possibilities
Prototyping around known needs and capabilities

Not just asking, but making, “what ifs”.

Finding the loosely distributed pieces

Futurejacking
Futurehacking/
“Guerilla
Futures”
Strategic Design/
Strategic Foresight
Design/
Foresight

What the future will do to you
What you will do to the future

Now Hiring

The future won’t write itself.

Design
Foresight
Strategy

Further Reading
Julian Bleecker — http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/
Nicolas Nova — http://www.liftlab.com/think/nova/
Bruce Sterling — http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/category/design-fiction/
Stuart Candy — http://futuryst.blogspot.com/
Jake Dunagan — http://www.iftf.org
Matt Jones — http://magicalnihilism.com/
Jason Tester — http://www.iftf.org/blog/14

Scott Smith
ssmith@changeist.com
www.changeist.com
@changeist

Unfinished Business Design Fiction Lecture @ OCAD

by Changeist on Oct 02, 2010

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Unfinished Business Design Fiction Lecture @ OCAD — Presentation Transcript