Imaginary Gadgets 0004: Design Fiction
Who: Julian Bleecker
What: it's a "design fiction" manifesto introducing various useful concepts including the "diegetic prototype," a form of imaginary gadget.
When: March 2009.
Where: "Near Future Laboratory," a "design-to-think studio" whose participants wander Europe and the USA.
How: It's a web manifesto.
Why: to advance and clarify thinking in "design fiction" and to puzzle out the relationship of "design fiction" to other creative efforts.
http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/
*This manifesto by Julian Bleecker is a 49-page illustrated synthesis of some of Julian's recent thinking, and I strongly recommend the entire piece. The pictures are especially convincing. There are, however, some text passages of particular significance here. With his permission I
circulate them here.
http://cloud.nearfuturelaboratory.com/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf
from:
Design Fiction, a short essay on design, science, fact and fiction
by Julian Bleecker, March 2009
(…)
There are many ways to express one's imagination. I've chosen fairly material ways over the years – engineering, art-technology, a small bit of writing. Nowadays, design occurs to me to be especially promising along side of the other forms of creative materialization I have explored. It provides a way to embed my imagination into the material things I've been making because it looks to be able to straddle the extremes of hard, cold fact (engineering) and the liminal, reflective and introspective (art).
(...) there is an incredible malleability to how I can make design into something useful to what I do, which is making new, provocative, sometimes preposterous things that reflect upon today and extrapolate into tomorrow.
From this starting place, I think of design as a kind of creative authoring practice – a way of describing and materializing ideas that are still looking for the right place to live. A designed object can connect an idea to its expression as a made, crafted, instantiated object. These are like props and conversation pieces that help speculate, reflect and imagine, even without words. They are things around which discussions happen, even with only one other person, and that help us to imagine other kinds of worlds and experiences. These are material objects that have a form, certainly. But they become real before themselves, because they could never exist outside of an imagined use context, however mundane and vernacular that imagined context of social practices might be. Designed objects tell stories, even by themselves.
If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story, what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre? Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction? Telling stories that appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else?
Design fiction as I am discussing it here is a conflation of design, science fact, and science fiction. It is an amalgamation of practices that together bends the expectations as to what each does on its own and ties them together into something new. It is a way of materializing ideas and speculations without the pragmatic curtailing that often happens when dead weights are fastened to the imagination.
(((It's very counterintuitive to suggest that "real objects" can be more fantastic than writing about unreal objects. But Dunne and Raby style "critical design" is a propaganda of the deed rather than story-telling. Their designs are much more provocative of cognitive dissonance than their textual writing. By using real objects – (or mock-ups of objects) – Dunne and Raby successfully escape some of the strictures of language. And written genres certainly have plenty of strictures. The general level of design within written works of science fiction is risible.)))
(...)
Science fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, create prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects – or designed fictions – can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software. The assembled design fictions are component parts for different kinds of near future worlds. They are like artifacts brought back from those worlds in order to be examined, studied over.
They are puzzles of a sort. A kind of object that has lots to say, but it is up to us to consider their meanings. They are complete specimens, but foreign in the sense that they represent a corner of some speculative world where things are different from how we might imagine the "future" to be, or how we imagine some other corner of the future to be.
These worlds are "worlds" not because they contain everything, but because they contain enough to encourage our imaginations, which, as it turns out, are much better at filling out the questions, activities, logics, culture, interactions and practices of the imaginary words in which such a designed object might exist. They are like conversation pieces, as much as a good science fiction film or novel can be a thing with ideas embedded in it around which conversations occur, at least in the best of cases. A design fiction practice creates these conversation pieces, with the conversations being stories about the kinds of experiences and social rituals that might surround the designed object. Design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds.
(((I'm struck here how much this resembles the common archeological study of artifacts from dead civilizations. Here scholars genuinely struggle to re-imagine vanished societies from rediscovered bits of junk. Material-culture studies are the retrodiction. Design fiction is the forecast.)))
(((Also: objects do not merely have a designer's ideas embedded within them. To an attentive eye, objects have entire social relationships embedded within them, often relationships expressed in very explicit textual ways, such as shrinkwrap, instruction sheets and legal disclaimers.)))
(((Most modern industrial white goods, if dissected, will reveal the frozen evidence of corporate structure: the domains of the engineering department, the electrical department, the legal department, marketing, branding, the traces of various subcontractors, offshoring agreements, and various gestures aimed at pleasing some particular consumer demographic. So "design fiction," it seems to me, should not limit itself to packing messages into hardware. Effective design fiction requires an ability to *read* hardware, it's a genre of hardware-literacy.)))
(...)
Design fiction does all of the unique things that science-fiction can do as a reflective, written story telling practice. (((Okay, maybe – I'm still waiting for a designed object where the boy gets the girl.)))
Like science fiction, design fiction creates imaginative conversations about possible future worlds. Like some forms of science fiction, it speculates about a near future tomorrow, extrapolating from today. In the speculation, design fiction casts a critical eye on current object forms and the interaction rituals they allow and disallow. The extrapolations allow for speculation without the usual constraints introduced when “hard decisions” are made by the program manager whose concerns introduce the least-common denominator specifications that eliminate creative innovation.
Design fiction is the cousin of science fiction. It is concerned more about exploring multiple potential futures rather than filling out the world with uninspired sameness. Design fiction creates opportunities for reflection as well as active making. (((For science fiction involved in "active making," you don't have to look much farther than Star Wars merchandising. Actually, if you push that, you're immediately into a Steampunk Maker scene, where a runaway fan-contingent is actively creating an open-source historical-fantasy subculture strongly centered on artifacts. Design fiction has a *lot* of cousins.)))
(...)
In this way design fiction is a hybrid, hands-on practice that operates in a murky middle ground between ideas and their materialization, and between science fact and science fiction. It is a way of probing, sketching and exploring ideas. Through this practice, one bridges imagination and materialization by modeling, crafting things, telling stories through objects, which are now effectively conversation pieces in a very real sense.
(…)
People who claim science fact as the practice idiom in which they do their work would never really say they do not imagine things beyond “fact.” Certainly they enter into a sort of science fiction, which they might describe as speculating and “brainstorming.” This is a kind of science fiction that is made legitimate by calling its result hypotheticals, or by explaining these speculations as “theoretical prototypes”, or “just ideas” as if to say, “I know this is silly and not really possible, nevertheless..” These are explanations that are like perimeter alarms going off around disciplinary turf, indicating that we’re beginning to breach the hard, well-policed border between the proper work of science fact and the murky terrain of science fiction. (((I think it's pretty clear that *all* forms of disciplinary turf are imploding on the Internet. The divide between factual and imaginary is only one part of those turfs. In fact, on the Internet even that turf-divide seems to be on fire; it's not about facts versus fantasies, it's about ontological culture war. As a science fiction writer, I don't feel the "factuality" of science as a problem at all; mushily fantastic "creation science" is much more disturbing and much more of a cultural threat to science fiction than the mortarboards and the peer-review.)))
It so happens that I can’t help but dig deeper into this interrelationship between science fact and science fiction. It’s part of a larger project to understand how culture circulates, especially the formation of ideas, knowledge and their object proxies.
(((I completely share this noble ambition of Comrade Bleecker, and "Imaginary Gadgets" is my attempt to break new ground within this "larger project" that he describes. That effort is clearly gonna take a long time. Also, it may well get me nowhere, but patience is one of the consolations of maturity.)))
Which ideas get to circulate out in the world and why? How do ideas obtain their “mass” and accumulate attention and conversation or become sidelined and obsolete? The larger project is especially about understanding the mechanisms by which material and ideas swap properties, which is why I want to understand and do design.
(((This is an extremely interesting field of inquiry. "Imaginary Gadgets" is not directly about how ideas "obtain mass," but more about what kinds of ideas are possible within material culture; what methods can be found to generate those ideas, a general theory of speculative culture. But obviously these questions are closely related. They directly meet in "scenius," where ideas are generated in closely-communicating groups of people. An idea which hasn't been clarified for communication probably isn't even an "idea." "Design fiction" isn't an idea until several people agree that "design fiction" is an idea, and then, gosh look, "design fiction" has become a "theory object.")))
More formally, this is what David A. Kirby calls the "diegetic prototype." [David A. Kirby, “The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes, and the Cinematic Creation of the Future”, forthcoming chapter in “Science on the Silver Screen: Science Consultants, Hollywood Films, and the Interactions Between Scientific and Entertainment Cultures.”]
It's a kind of technoscientific prototyping activity knotted to science fiction film production that emphasizes the circulation of knowledge and ideas. It is like a concept prototype, only with the added design fiction property of a story into which the
prototype can play its part in a way different from a plain old demonstration.
The prototype enlivens the narrative, moving the story forward while at the same time subtly working through the details of itself.
The diegetic prototype refers to the way that a science fiction film provides an opportunity for a technical consultant to speculate within the fictional reality of the film, considering their work as more than a props maker or effects artist creating appearances. The diegetic prototype inserts itself into the film’s drama which activates the designed object, making it a necessary component of the story. The film itself becomes an opportunity to explore an idea, share it publicly and realize it, at least in part and with the consistency necessary for film production rather than laboratory production.
(((So "design fiction" finds its big-time in the movies, just like its cousin, science fiction. Not too surprising, since industrial design was the child of Broadway set-design.)))
“..scientists and engineers can also create realistic filmic images of “technological possibilities” with the intention of reducing anxiety and stimulating desire in audiences to see potential technologies become realities. For scientists and engineers, the best way to jump start technical development is to produce a working prototype. Working prototypes, however, are time consuming, expensive and require initial funds.
I argue in this essay that for technical advisors, cinematic depictions of future technologies are actually “diegetic prototypes” that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability. Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage even over true prototypes: in the diegesis these technologies exist as “real” objects that function properly and which people actually
use.” [Kirby]
(((There follows quite a lot of fascinating specialized analysis of the social relationship between tech experts peddling their wares and movie directors acting as billboards for emerging technologies. I really like the term "diegetic prototype," mostly because it is A-OK for 2010 AD and not as musty as "gizmo" or even "McGuffin." But "diegetic prototype" doesn't cover all the imaginary ground.)))
(((For instance, in Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandals gorefest "Gladiator," there's a Romanpunk reworking of a Blade Runner-style diegetic prototype. A bunch of ultra-hard-bitten gladiators, killing time while awaiting their inevitable death in the arena, are playing a dice game involving a wicker basket with a live cobra. Clearly this game never existed – it’s a steampunk back-projection to make Roman gladiators more cinematic, more supergladiatorial. It's "design fiction," though; it's a miraculously impractical, imaginary gadget that works very memorably as a narrative device; as a comment on imaginary social relationships; as device-fiction.)))
A final note: unconcidentally, I have also written an
essay titled "Design Fiction." It has a lot more questions
than it has answers.
REFERENCES:
"Design Fiction" by Bruce Sterling.
http://interactions.acm.org/content/?p=1244
David A. Kirby.
http://www.davidakirby.com/page4.htm
