Design Fiction Research Articles

Research Through Game Design. Interactive Stories from a Submerged Amsterdam

Deciding what kind of smart cities do we, as a society, want is not only a political question but also a matter of envisioning possible futures. The speculative narratives that designers produce to support their imagination are called Fictions. We share SUBMERGED, a cross-platform project that combines game design, interactive narrative, and urban exploration with the objective of empowering citizens to produce their design fictions. Following a Research through Design practice, we describe our process for creating SUBMERGED, we synthesize some critical insights from our experience, and we urgently call for a dialogue between semioticians and design researchers on these topics.

Autonomous eMotorsports racing games: Emerging practices as speculative fictions

Abstract Motorsports games and simulated automobile racing occupy a dynamic genre of computer games for entertaining play, critical game studies and ‘auto-play’. This article utilizes the lens of speculative design to present six scenarios that seek to motivate the design of autonomous eMotorsports games and play experiences through alternative design fictions. These fictions serve to help identify and tease out how different socio-technical configurations emerging around autonomous vehicles, motorsports games, sim racing user interfaces and user experiences, embrace or exclude different stakeholders. These stakeholders can shape how autonomous eMotorsports games, game play and game viewing will emerge and prosper. These fictions also serve as a narrative web of possible socio-technical configurations open to critical review through: (1) transhumanist spectacle and spectating; (2) technofeminist and gendered framings of these configurations; and (3) whether digital artefacts configured to realize autonomous eMotorsports games have politics.

Design fictions for behaviour change: exploring the long-term impacts of technology through the creation of fictional future prototypes

ABSTRACTHuman–computer interaction researchers are increasingly designing behaviour change technologies for a variety of purposes, from promoting healthier lifestyles to support sustainable habits. These technologies are commonly assessed in terms of their effectiveness in modifying human behaviour. Nevertheless, the multifaceted social and psychological long-term consequences of these kinds of artifacts are often forgotten. To explore their design space, we involved 48 students asking them to envision and design future behaviour change systems. Following the recent interest in design fictions, which present ‘fantasy prototypes’ in plausible near futures, we investigated how designs might help people think of the presuppositions and implications of technology. Then, we analyzed four design fictions to explore themes that are often forgotten in the current behaviour change debate. We finally discussed the empirical and methodological outcomes of our study and presented a series of design considerations and research questions that could stimulate further reflections on behaviour change technologies and the method we employed.

Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into "our own"

This essay serves as a speculative design fiction that traces the history of fan creation platforms from the past to the present and finally to a possible future. Using the history and success of the Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org/) as a focal point, I consider the importance of owning the servers as a way for fan communities to create and preserve culture and reassert values. Examining one possible legal and technological future with an air of optimism allows us to consider what fannish communities can do now to maintain a path of our own.

Project Pulse: co-designing the ‘smart’ campus with Internet of (teaching and learning) Things

This short paper describes a research project which aims to co-design prototype Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with staff and students at a higher education institution in the UK. However, rather than adopting a technical approach, which would perceive devices simply as ‘problem solving’ instruments, this project seeks to engage with critical approaches to IoT through the use of speculative methods (Ross 2016), such as ‘design fictions’ and ‘objects-to-think-with’. This approach is intended to surface crucial conceptual and ethical issues for education, such as the radical intensification of digital networks potentially engendered by this technology, and the prospect of increasing surveillance and diminishing privacy in an era of ubiquitous connection. These are questions too often overlooked in the habitual forecasting and advocacy of ‘new’ educational technology, but also in the engrained approaches to ‘solutionist’ (Morozov 2013) technology design. This paper will outline the two initial stages of this ongoing project: firstly, the development of preliminary IoT provocations; and secondly, the outcomes from co-design workshops with staff and students. The preliminary IoT devices include: campus motion and sound-level sensors; live public PC login feeds from across the campus; collated social media feeds from distance students; wearable smart watches configured to receive feed data; a smart phone app with interactive functions that can respond to feed notifications; and a web-based interface to visualise the range of data feeds. These devices were produced to demonstrate specific, and provocative, educational applications of IoT technologies, and to encourage responses from workshop participants. The second stage will describe outcomes from two co-design workshops: the first with campus-based and distance students; and the second with teaching staff at the institution in question (scheduled for November 2017). Grounded in the themes of ‘presence’, ‘community’, and ‘surveillance’, these workshops are designed to elicit critical responses to IoT technologies in higher education through the development of speculative designs that 1) enact key issues for students and teachers by modelling practice, and 2) offer creative alternatives to established design cultures by resisting, and obfuscating (Brunton & Nissenbaum 2013) the drive for ‘big data’ collection and its promoted efficiency gains. Drawing on these designs, this paper will conclude with, not only the key challenges that students and teachers perceive in the networked futures of higher education, but also creative visions for alternative technologies that can approximate new ways of connecting the humans and ‘things’ involved in education.

Co-design in the Context of Collaborative Research Centre Projects: Homeowner DIY Renovation Design Fictions

Co-design in the Context of Collaborative Research Centre Projects: Homeowner DIY Renovation Design Fictions

<i>The Girl Who Fell to Earth</i>: Sophia Al-Maria’s Retro-Futurism

This article reads Sophia Al-Maria’s aesthetics of Gulf Futurism as a mode of retro-futurist nostalgia, nostalgia not for the past but for the future. Retro-futurism can be understood in terms of what Mark Fisher has called, following Jacques Derrida, “hauntology” (Fisher 2014), the project of interrogating the failure of the utopian promises of modernity on both personal and collective registers. Literary and cultural critics have long maintained that postmodernism marks a post-futurist moment in which imagined futures are pre-determined by the ideological imperatives of market capitalism. Yet, this “slow cancellation of the future” (Berardi 2011: 18) has paradoxically entailed a proliferation of 21st-century futurisms: Afro-Futurism, Sino-Futurism, Gulf Futurism, accelerationism, design fiction, climate fiction, and so forth. My argument is that, in its articulation of Gulf Futurism, The Girl Who Fell to Earth distorts and undermines modernity’s signature narrative of development and progress, holding up a mirror to its history of broken promises and thereby challenging its imagined foreclosure of possible futures.

Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks

Although "privacy by design" (PBD)?embedding privacy protections into products during design, rather than retroactively?uses the term "design" to recognize how technical design choices implement and settle policy, design approaches and methodologies are largely absent from PBD conversations. Critical, speculative, and value-centered design approaches can be used to elicit reflections on relevant social values early in product development, and are a natural fit for PBD and necessary to achieve PBD's goal. Bringing these together, we present a case study using a design workbook of speculative design fictions as a values elicitation tool. Originally used as a reflective tool among a research group, we transformed the workbook into artifacts to share as values elicitation tools in interviews with graduate students training as future technology professionals. We discuss how these design artifacts surface contextual, socially-oriented understandings of privacy, and their potential utility in relationship to other values levers.

Cheering Artificial Intelligence Leader: Creative Writing and Materializing Design Fiction

Bringing together science and literature for purposes of casting these knowledge areas into relief is a well-established analytical practice. Rather less studied is the turn toward material practice as it has unfolded across science studies and the arts. However, this trend has the potential to open up new methods for thinking about science and literature and new forms of public engagement. This paper explores one possibility for combining creative writing in the form of sports cheers. It posits a materialized future scenario designed to encourage the public to consider potential futures and explore their individual ideas about a particular technological development (in this case artificial intelligence) in a fun and imaginative way.

Le design fiction

Une série a été ouverte, dans Futuribles , sur les relations et apports de la science-fiction à la prospective, afin de discerner si, et dans quelle mesure, les auteurs de science-fiction ont eu une influence sur les imaginaires collectifs et sur les réflexions prospectives (numéros 413 de juillet-août 2016, 416 de janvier-février 2017 et 420 de septembre-octobre 2017). Cet article porte sur un outil de représentation des futurs qui se développe depuis quelques années et prolonge certaines réflexions exprimées dans cette série : le design fiction (parfois traduit par design critique ou spéculatif). Le design fiction se présente en effet comme une nouvelle façon de produire des récits ou des objets (plus ou moins futuristes, dérangeants, dystopiques…) visant à nous permettre de mieux appréhender le futur. Nicolas Minvielle et Olivier Wathelet, qui pratiquent le design fiction , montrent ici en quoi cette technique consiste précisément et présentent des exemples de mise en œuvre. Ils soulignent en particulier l’importance du recours à l’imaginaire puisqu’il s’agit bien de faire réagir une audience sur la représentation (via des vidéos, des objets…) de futurs possibles, plus ou moins désirables, et de susciter un débat à partir de ces réactions. Cet outil émergent a sans aucun doute un rôle à jouer dans les démarches de créativité, d’innovation, d’aide à la décision et de représentation de l’avenir ; il pourrait en outre évoluer rapidement grâce aux possibilités ouvertes par l’essor des techniques telles que la réalité virtuelle ou augmentée… S.D.

Situated: Reconsidering Context in the Creation and Interpretation of Design Fictions

Design fiction and ethnographic methods strengthen each other by creating a creative but rigorous scaffolding for interrogating expectations and reactions to the future. Design fiction can influence the activities, people, and places in which ethnography is done, and ethnography can create design fictions. Viewers and creators populate design fictions with their own past, present, and hoped for future. The intersection of these methods push ethnography beyond the edges of its thoughtful consideration of the present moment, in order to begin investigating the future.

Using design fictions as a tool for engaging citizens in debating future pervasive health systems and services

The benefits provided by health-related technologies are often counterbalanced by the societal, legal and ethical challenges connected with the pervasive monitoring of people, as necessitated by such technological interventions. Through the ProtoPolicy research project we explored the co-creation and use of design fictions as a tool for open debate of pervasive health systems. Design fictions were co-created and tested in a series of design workshops with community groups in the UK. A thematic analysis of a debate among older people on a smart home and assisted living design fiction highlighted societal and ethical issues relevant to personal and pervasive health system design. We conclude that ethics, like ‘usability’, may be usefully based on engagement with directly or indirectly implicated publics and should not be designed into innovation by experts alone.

László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop as Design Fiction: Perspectives on Conservation and Replication

Light Prop for an Electric Stage was presented in 1930 as a prototype for a new kind of mechanical theater that was meant to spark future partnerships between art and industry. Although it was never put into industrial production, Light Prop circulated as an early example of kinetic sculpture, as documented in a highly composed film, in photographs and in textual accounts. In 2016, the Harvard Art Museums and metaLAB (at) Harvard filmed Light Prop and its 2006 replica under highly controlled conditions. The resulting comparative media reveals how László Moholy-Nagy’s film served as the “design fiction” guiding the replication and conservation of Light Prop.

Co-designing Design Fictions: a New Approach for Debating and Priming Future Healthcare Technologies and Services

This article was published in Archives of Design Research on 31 May 2017 available open access at https://doi.org/10.15187/adr.2017.05.30.2.5

Near Future School: World building beyond a neoliberal present with participatory design fictions

This article reports on one part of an on-going project, the Near Future School, which aims to translate and explore the potential of participatory design fiction practices for use with young people and those that work with them to explore near future scenarios of education that open up alternative and plural futures in the context of processes of foreclosure in a neoliberalising society. The focus here is to explore the practical and ethical issues of developing a speculative form of governance, using the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza, as an act of imaginative world building through participatory design fictions. The research raises a series of questions and issues relating to understanding how design fiction’s multiple inheritances, from fiction and design or art and design, need to be better understood and enacted within participatory design fiction processes.

Spimes and speculative design: Sustainable product futures today

This paper unpacks Sterling’s concept of spimes and outlines how it can be developed as a lens through which to speculate and reflect upon the future of more preferable and sustainable technological products. The term spimes denotes a class of near future, sustainable, manufactured objects, and unlike the disposable products, which permeate our society today, a spime would be designed so that it can be managed sustainably throughout its entire lifecycle. This would have the goal of making the implicit consequences of product obsolescence and unsustainable disposal explicit to potential users. With the current rhetoric associated with the so-called Internet of Things promoting existing production and consumption models, the time is right to explore Sterling’s concept in greater depth. In doing so, this paper examines the meaning of the term spimes, distinguishes the concept from today’s Internet-connected products and posits design criteria for potential near future spime objects. The paper concludes with an initial evaluation of a speculative design fiction created by the author – the Toaster for Life – which seeks to embody several of the spime design criteria in order to facilitate audiences in considering the unsustainable people-product relationships which define present day behaviour, and also aid the author in reflecting upon the design fiction process itself.

Ethical Design Fiction: Between Storytelling and World Building

In this paper we examine how ethical challenges can be approached in and through design fiction. To do so, we develop a new framework for analysis as well as creation of design fictions. Our main focus will be on design fiction within a strategical setting, connecting the notion of design fiction to the design process within large corporations as well as strategic design and decision making. Three cases are presented to support our findings. The final contribution will be the design fiction framework found in the conclusion.

Design Fiction: Anticipating Adoption

This tutorial highlights the potential of design fiction with Game of Drones, a fictional user trial of an imagined Drone Enforcement System. The authors explore a potential future use of drones for civic enforcement activities and advance a program for developing design fiction as a research method. This method provides a means for exploring the societal, technological, and political nuances of possible futures so researchers can better consider possible adoption pathways for emerging technologies. This tutorial is part of a special issue on drones.

Real Vegan Cheese and the Artistic Critique of Biotechnology.

Drawing on the case study of Real Vegan Cheese (RVC), a synthetic biology project housed in a community lab or “biohackerspace,” I argue that biohacking performs an “artistic critique” of the bioeconomy. Following Boltanski and Chiapello’s use of the term, the “artistic critique” pits values of autonomy and creativity against a view of capitalist production as standardized and alienating, represented (in the case of biotechnology) by Monsanto’s monoculture GMOs. In this way, biohacking is depicted as liberating biotechnology from the constraints of corporate and academic institutions. Through the use of design fiction and a playful aesthetic, projects such as RVC demonstrate a more legitimate––with respect to the values of the artistic critique––mode of production for a new generation of biotechnology products, one that is portrayed as driven primarily by ethical and aesthetic values rather than the profit motive. This analysis highlights the role that aesthetic and affective strategies play in advancing particular sociotechnical visions, and the way that biohacking projects operate in symbiosis with incumbent institutions even as they define themselves in opposition to them. Finally, it suggests that biohacking has certain limitations when considered as a form of public engagement with science.

Furious futures and apocalyptic design fictions

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors