1. Design Futures through Design Fiction
Professor Paul Coulton
Chair of Speculative and Game Design, Lancaster University, UK
@ProfTriviality
2. Research Practice
R r
Research into Design Research through Design Research for Design
Process Artifact
New Knowledge
research questions emerge
from context and criteria
6. Vapourware
Vaporware is a term
commonly used to describe
software and hardware
that’s is announced, and
sometimes marketed, but
never actually produced
ATARII 2700
16. Design Fiction
“deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to
suspend disbelief about change... It
means you’re thinking very seriously
about potential objects and services and
try to get people to concentrate on
those – rather than entire worlds or
geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of
fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells
worlds rather than stories”
Bruce Sterling
17. Design Fiction
“deliberate use of diegetic prototypes
to suspend disbelief about change...
It means you’re thinking very seriously
about potential objects and services and
try to get people to concentrate on
those – rather than entire worlds or
geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of
fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells
worlds rather than stories”
Bruce Sterling
18. Diegesis
mimesis and diegesis describe ways of
presenting a story. In mimesis, the story is
acted out. In diegesis, the story is narrated.
Mimesis is show. Diegesis is tell.
19. Diegetic Prototypes
“have a major rhetorical
advantage even over true
prototypes: in the fictional
world – what film scholars refer
to as diegesis – as these
technologies exist as real
objects that function properly
and that people can actually
use.”
Kirby 2009
20. Present
adapted from James Auger
Present
Future
Domestication
Emerging
Technology
Speculative Futures
Design Fictions
Vapour Fiction
Past
Speculative Futures
Design Fictions
Vapourware
Alternate Presents
or Lost Futures
24. Design Fiction
“So a design fiction is
(1) something that creates a fictional world, (2) has something
being prototyped within that fictional world, (3) does so in
order to create a discursive space.”
“Although this definition appears straightforward, complexity
arrives when we consider what something may be”
Lindley and Coulton
27. World Building
In response to the recent European Directive the UK government sanctioned the use of drones by commercial providers subject to
pilots holding an approved Drone Pilot Proficiency Certificate (DPPC). As the government anticipated the main use has been in
providing services to local authorities that aid in the enforcement of local by-laws. Whilst many commercial providers have followed
the traditional path of employing dedicated enforcement officers to pilot the drones, in this paper we present on-going research that
'gamifies' the enforcment activities to allow members of the local community to act as enforcement officers. In particular we have
worked with retired members of the police and armed services as drone pilots in relation to the enforcement of by-laws relating to
parking offences and dog fouling in a small UK city. The initial results indicate that not only does this age group find the game-like
activity enjoyable they feel that they are providing an important service to their community.
39. allowing players to consider alternate presents and plausible futures
Games as Speculative Design
40. Critical Games
thus far the focus of the critical
games created has primarily
been either: critiques of current
events or practices; or critiques
of games themselves
43. Persuasive Technology
B.J Fogg
Captology - reduce a problem so
that it can be addressed through
the promotion of minor behavioural
change for easily understood and
uncontroversial goals.
49. Game
Game Designer Player
Rules
Interaction
Game Design as Rhetoric
Rhetoric of Design
the basic representational mode of
videogames is “procedurality”,
enacted through rule- based
representations and interactions
and, when used to reveal
processes or concepts of another
system, present the player with a
procedural rhetoric
Ian Bogost
58. Games as Speculative Design Should:
Enable a Plurality of Futures
Be Plausible
Enable both Mimesis and Diegesis
Be Iterative
Not Resort to Reductionism
Perpetual Beta