*It's always great when a cultural practice is jumping into places where theory and the academy don't quite know what to make of it.
http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2008/04/design-fiction-is-fact.html
(...)
"Now, apart from the oddly anachronistic carnival sideshow tone to the email – step right up, marvel at the amazing bearded lady, and the fabulous pensonal computers carried within her pockets! – the other thing that's strange to me here is that, in such a fast-moving arena of innovation, the same ideas and images are bouncing around the Net four or five years after their first appearance.
"I'm not just referring to the chain email from my student – which, like any meme worth its salt, clearly has a sort of electronic bottom-feeder's life of its own – (((y'know, Stuart Candy can really write pretty well))) but at the time of writing, I can find the P-ISM (with the natty subtitle, "A Pen-style Personal Networking Gadget Package") and the same illustrations, featured together with other concept designs – "not planned to be commercialized at this point" – at NEC's website.
"They're under the heading Resonantware: "Next Generation Ubiquitous Networking Devices Visualized By Designers". Others include the "gumi" – edible, gummy-coated RF-ID chips containing usage rights to images and music; the malleable communication device "tag" (which looks a lot like the Morph); and the "dew" Life Recording Interface (which appeared in PC Mag's 25th anniversary feature on "Future Concept Designs" in January 02008).
"In recent months, in pursuit of future artifacts and an understanding of what makes them tick, we seem to have stumbled into a design twilight zone where notion, concept in development, prototype and fully-fledged gizmo are all fluidly in play (and at work) in the ideascape...."
