The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets: a project
This project is straightforward: it's a catalog of the weirdest things imaginable.
If you don't care to actively contribute to the Imaginary Gadgets project, you can stop reading right here. You are perfectly welcome to simply watch the goings-on. If you're on this list, you will be getting some email. If you want off the list, let me know.
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Now for some specifics for the ten percent who will contribute, and the one percent who will actively theorize. I like gadgets as well as the next guy – better, maybe – but the gadgets are my stalking-horse in this effort.
I am stalking something that has no proper name. So I am going to give it a chronologism ( – a verbal place-marker designed for a short life-span).
"Speculative Culture."
As a book – and this project will likely become a book, in fairly short order – "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets" has no genre. Within the context of "speculative culture" though, this book would make good sense.
The "users" of imaginative gadgets are people trying hard to think about the nonexistent in an effective way. Not daydreamers, but true users of the imagination: creative people active within many fields. That's "Speculative Culture."
I believe that the Internet, by mashing-together so many inventive and forward-thinking disciplines, is enabling a "Speculative Culture." I see a lot of this transpiring today. I seem to be doing more and more work in that arena myself – creative work quite hard to describe in terms from 20 years ago. If you are on this list, you may be involved in speculative-culture already.
You are likely getting useful, provocative insights from people who were never your colleagues in the past. These are people with thought-processes somewhat orthogonal to your own, who nevertheless show up repeatedly on your search engines as you perform your own work. For instance, go look at my 100+ Twitter contacts – "bruces." How many of those people are "science fiction writers" or even "writers" of any kind? Many of these characters have careers that can't be described in less than a paragraph.
I think this situation is a fact-on-the-ground for a densely-networked, digitized society. I also think the pace of this phenomenon is accelerating. I don't believe we will get a choice about it. If it's inevitable, then we should exploit the inevitability.
Now, my larger suspicion here – let's call it a hypothesis – is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience. If there's no such thing, then that's a useful discovery, too.
Since I am a writer, the first deliverable for this project is a book, the book to be called "User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets." Composing a book is my own way to test the waters: to create a work that would be a typical "Speculative Culture" book. The very act of writing books creates culture. So, perhaps we'll do some useful work here.
How do we go about it? The scope of all things imaginable is unimaginable. Even the scope of relatively humble "gadgets" is colossal. How can we usefully delimit this effort?
I'm interested in gadgets that illuminate speculative thought. I'm especially looking for imaginary constructs at the edges of the thinkable. Mere "weirdness" is parochial. The "impossible" is trivial. I'm searching for gadgets that are mind-stretching – so as to explore the set of possible stretches. These are the "imaginary gadgets" that the imaginative can "use."
Not every imaginary gadget has a high "brain-candy factor." But those are the ones that we seek. That is our field-work.
My suspicion is that all speculative techniques can apply to "gadgets." I suspect that any form of speculation can all be realized in a physical form. Scientific experiment, scenario work, simulation games, metaphors and modelling, storyboards and storytelling, process flows, analytical software of various kinds, brainstorming, historical analogy, mash-ups of unrelated processes and objects, extrapolation... They all have some possible manifestation in material culture. Maybe. So I surmise. Is that true?
So: what, then, is a gadget? The term "gadget" seems to be old, working-class sailor slang. It first appears in print in the work of Rudyard Kipling, where it's used by a crusty old salt to describe an annoying piece of a broken steam-car. "Gadget" is a chronologism. It denotes a technical object that is immediately at hand, yet too complicated to summarize with some better, time-tested noun. All true gadgets require imagination.
Real gadgeteers naturally prefer real gadgets – they get a little shamefaced at peddling stuff which is frankly made-up. So real gadgeteers involve themselves with personal, portable, electronic or mechanical devices that seem to lean forward into futurity. These real-life devices are pitched toward a youthful, free-spending demographic. So the gadgets on modern gadget sites are netbooks, laptops, cellphones, PDAs, cameras, game devices, music players, a few wearable tech devices and toy robots. And so on.
However, this everyday, real-life tech-clutter is pretty thin gruel for us bold Imaginary Gadgeteers. We prefer gadgets with maximal speculative content. So, we study the following:
Futuristic gadgets (possible in theory, yet beyond today's technical capacity to create).
"Critical designs" – design work never intended for production, which points out the weaknesses and limitations of industry and commerce as we know them.
Radically impossible gadgets (perpetual motion machines, medical quack devices and other gadgets that violate the laws of physics).
"Un-useless inventions" like the "chindogu," imaginary products which gently lampoon our desires.
Classic science fiction gadgets: blasters, ray-guns, jet-packs, time machines, robot assistants and so forth.
Comical contraptions of the school of Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson.
Gadgets of the fantastic and the occult (crystal balls, magic wands); the personal hardware of the saints and the gods.
Gadgets which can only "exist" within simulated gaming and role-play environments.
Dead imaginary gadgets invented for vanished technosocial contexts. Most patented inventions that were never manufactured. Ninety percent of patents go nowhere. This is the junkheap of imaginary gadgetry, the place where imagination goes to die.
"Vaporware" – gadgets that were once coyly promised by real commercial enterprises, yet they never actually existed.
Hobbyist devices that exist in editions of one – the "personal technosocial."
Devices that might usefully stretch the definitions of gadgetry, such as scientific laboratory equipment, conceptual-art machines, high-tech cosmetics kits and imaginary household crafts.
"Other." Especially, other. This project is very much concerned with mapping the otherness. There's a whole lot of otherness out there.
The Imaginary Gadgets project will center around devices; not around theory, and it is not fiction. Speculative disciplines are breaking down and re-integrating today – and so are objects. Products today are commonly integrated into services, services are being integrated into data-clouds... The line between the imaginary and the actual is becoming fractal. Where are those boundaries, and how are they fruitfully crossed?
In order to give our effort some teeth, we are also going to realize some imaginary gadgets. We are going to take chosen gadgets from the realm of the conceptual and make them real. Surely any serious imaginary gadget project should have a manufacturing arm.
So it's quite a large, diffuse project, as you can see. However, the best time to plant a future orchard is always today. So, let's get going.
