Designing fiction

What is this all about?

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.

I dont mean this to be one of those silly proprietary practices things that
design agencies are fond of patenting. This is much more aspirational than that
sort of nonsense. Its part an ongoing explanation of why The Near Future
Laboratory does such peculiar things, and why we emphasize the near future. The
essay is a way of describing why alternative futures that are about people and
their practices are way more interesting here than profit and feature sets. Its a
way to invest some attention on what can be done rather immediately to mitigate a
complete systems failure; and part an investment in creating playful, peculiar,
sideways-looking things that have no truck with the up-and-to-the-right kind of
futures. Things can be otherwise; different from the slipshod sorts of futures that
economists, accountants and engineers assume always are faster, smaller, cheaper
and with two more features bandied about on advertising glossies and spec sheet.

Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. Its 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. Its about reading
P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design
manual. Its 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.

When you trace the knots that link science, fact and fiction you see the
fascinating crosstalk between and amongst ideas and their materialization. In the
tracing you see the simultaneous knowledge-making activities, speculating and
pondering and realizing that things are made only by force of the imagination. In
the midst of the tangle, one begins to see that fact and fiction are productively
indistinguishable.

Design is about the future in a way similar to science fiction. It probes

imaginatively and materializes ideas, the way science fiction materializes ideas,
oftentimes through stories. What are the ways that all of these things these
canonical ways of making and remaking and imagining the world can come together
in a productive way, without hiding the details and without worrying about the
nonsense of strict disciplinary boundaries?

How did William Shatner change the world? If youre wondering, allow yourself to
enjoy the remarkable, campy and entertaining documentary (of sorts) called How
William Shatner Changed the World Science fact and science fiction are given a good
stir in this show, which explores the science behind the science-fiction of Star
Trek. Whereas Josephs technical fan art translates the science fiction into a
speculative science fact, this short, campy docu-film follows William Shatner,
playing William Shatner, trotting about the world pointing to the ways that Star
Trek influenced real, science fact in the world today. We see interviews with real
people scientists and technologists mostly who have anecdotal stories about how
Star Trek inspired their breakthrough ideas, or provided a backdrop near future
imaginary for their aspirational thinking.

The intermingling of science, fact, fiction, production is exhibited on this

ancient cover of Time Magazine, 14 years ago during the last Jurassic Park (the
movie) dinosaur craze. (Read this closely: it contains truth, a science, a film, a
correction to your grade school knowledge, and special effects made
props/prototypes of science.) Curious crosstalk between science fiction and science
fact, genetics, science politics and museum exhibition design was energized by this
Spielberg/Crichton/Horner collaboration. Horner? Who? He is the swaggering outlaw
paleontologist hired on by Spielberg to serve as a technical consultant who was
also the basis for the thinly veiled Sam Neil character called Alan Grant in the
film. He held a controversial theory that dinosaurs were more bird-like than
previously thought. This was a minority view in the paleontology (the science)
community. But, with the film and his participation as a science consultant, it was
a view that became bolstered way behind the possibilities of peer-review, patient
experimentation, annual science convention discussions and scholarly arguments. If
you need more convincing that the science of fact and the science of fiction are
all tangled up, and can be productively intertwined, read on.

Aspire, imagine, make the future you want.

Ive written more about this, from some conversations with friends and colleagues
last fall. It's called Designing of fact and fiction. It started at that
discussion group with Paul in 2005 or 2006, and evolved into something I presented
last fall at the Design Engaged 08 workshop in Montreal, then the SHiFT 08
conference in Lisbon last October, then at the Moving Movie Industry conference,
finally at the OReilly ETech 2009 conference.

Subsequently, this topic has been taken up in a variety of forms and venues. Bruce
Sterling has a wonderful essay on the topic in the ACM Interactions journal. And I
organized a panel at South by Southwest 2010. with Bruce, Sascha Pohflepp, Stuart
Candy and Jake Dunagen with Jennifer Leonard doing an excellent job of wrangling
and moderating.

A written kind of design provocation. For the last several months, theres been a
bit more word cobbling than wire soldering. The two practices contribute to the
same set of objectives, which is to make and remake the world around us, provide
new perspectives and evolve a set of principles that help make the making more
imaginative, more aspirational.
I should also add that, when I was writing my masters thesis on Virtual Reality
some time ago (itd have to be some time ago for that topic), I wrote about
science fiction meeting science fact, which was some of the earliest inspiration
for this work, shared by the laboratory imaginary of the grad student cyberfreaks
in the University of Washington HITLab and our reading/re-reading of Gibsons
Neuromancer during the early 1990s. Not just Neuromancer but all kinds of science
fact/fiction. The simultaneity of the science fiction and the military science fact
that was the first Gulf War. I wrote about that, too, because I was being taught by
the guy who made that military technology, which was an unpleasant experience, but
one from which I learned a great deal about how fact and fiction can swap
properties. That same curiosity led to further interest in visual stories and their
role in understanding and making sense of the world around us, especially in
science fiction film and video games. I wrote a dissertation on this, studying with
Donna Haraway, err..when I was a young lad in 1993-95. Therein was a chapter on
Jurassic Park as simultaneously science fact and fiction. We had plenty of lively
discussions specifically on this film. (Sarah Franklin was visiting at UCSC then
and wrote some really amazing stuff about science fiction and genetics out of that,
back in the late 90s that appears in Global Nature, Global Culture.) There was a
seminar paper I did on Until the End of the World, looking at the Sony Design
concepts Wim Wenders used to create a compelling science fact within the science
fiction diegesis. In there was one of the earliest bits of video game commentary
(SimCity 2000) from a critical theory perspective, not that I care about
ordinality, but some folks seem to. There was a chapter on the SGI Reality Engine,
ILM and Special Effects in science fiction (mostly Jurassic Park, which brought me
to David Kirbys early work hes the guy who coined this phrase diegetic
prototypes, btw) and science fact showing the techniques and technologies that
allow media to cross from fiction to fact. And so on. In many ways, this essay is a
continuation of these interests and one I share with a great deal of friends,
colleagues and complete strangers, Im sure. Lots of people are playing around in
here, excitedly and eagerly swapping ideas and stories. Its a conversation thats
usually quite energetic and fun. If the ideas herein intersect and entangle with
yours, it means youre a healthy, creative individual, aspiring for a better near
future we all hope to one day to live within. Its a waste of my time to say things
like yes, Im working on that. Yes, I have been working on this while you were in
grammar school. And to do this every time someone mentions something you are also
thinking on? Thats just preposterous. I used to do that with students, or point
out to them someone who has also been working on something they think they have
thought about for the first time. Inevitably, for the younger students who think
theyre the only ones in the world who thought about such-and-so idea they shrink
and pout and get petty and dont realize that they are in a world of ideas and
their uniqueness is in the doing, not the clamoring to be Sir Edmund Hillary
climbing that hill for the first time. Thats an ancient, sick model of
intellectual and creative cultural production. Its a world of circulation these
days, with knots and rhizomes and linkages between lots of activities.
And thats all I have to say about that.