http://praxagora.com/andyo/fiction/hardware_guy/
*I think this is pretty good example of how NOT to do 'design fiction.' It's fiction about a design issue – technical issues with cloud design – but it's coming across like science fiction. Yet there's not enough scope or sense-of-wonder for it to work as science fiction. So it feels dull and claustrophic and scarcely permits itself to be read.
*This should have been a fakery YouTube video about a cloud computing center in trouble. It should have relied mostly on set design to make its points, with just a little zingy dialogue to illustrate the issue. Thirty, forty-five seconds. It might have gotten some viral pickup among the small demographic that confronts these things, and we'd all be better off for that intervention. "Huh. I never thought of it that way." Mission accomplished.
*Good design fiction has an audience like fiction does, but it's hampered if it overindulges in storytelling elements. And if it plays to a general audience, it's gonna waste too much time in exposition.
*If you think of a thriving social enterprise that lies a lot about designed products, it's advertising. It's probably no accident that a lot of good design fiction comes across as Adbuster-like "subvertising."
*Here Andy Oram explains what he's up to:
For April Fools Day I'm offering a short story about a future world
that has moved entirely to cloud computing:
http://praxagora.com/andyo/fiction/hardware_guy
The cloud still scares as many IT managers as it attracts. But the
advantages of cloud computing for maintenance, power consumption, and
other things suggests it will dominate computing in a decade or so.
Meanwhile, other changes are affecting the way we use data
everyday. Movements such as NoSQL, big data, and the Semantic Web all
come at data from different angles, but indicate a shift from
retrieving individual facts we want to looking at relationships among
huge conglomerations of data. I've explored all these things in blogs,
along with some other trends such as shrinking computer devices, so
now I decided to combine them in a bit of a whacky tale.
(((Now imagine his whacky tale as a satirical subvertisement for an
imaginary cloud-provision company. This would have worked.
More interesting yet, if you were a commercial competitor of, say,
the Amazon cloud, you could quietly hire a "design fiction" PR firm to assemble
a FUD attack-ad like that, and that scheme would REALLY work.)))
