https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/9b1fbba7ae2b
(...)
"For a minute, stop and think about the amount of consultancy work that has been presented to clients but never made it off the production line. The sheer volume of objects that have been proposed, considered and rejected. Often described as vapourware, design consultancies produce a massive about of work that remains in the realm of unbuildable, often unread and considerably fictional. Proposals are dismissed due to a range of factors - fit to market, economic viability, brand alignment etc. but for whatever the reason they remain in the imagination of the designer (with scattered fragments of evidence contained in the portfolios of companies and people).
"The ‘diegetic’ quality of the worlds that DF build are arguably similar to the accounts that we give of the use, market, popularity and impact of many of our proposals. We always design for a world that sits, sometimes just slightly, out of sight. We engage in a complex set of actors in order to move our fictions into the realm of the real. We fight against the Dark Matter to get work made.
"This observation is nothing new. But it’s essential to understand my continued interest in speculation and fiction. My challenge is how to construct and design an educational curriculum that develops the wide range of skills and knowledge it takes to be a designer, whilst opening up a space for our students to push the boundaries of our discipline. By focussing on the speculative and fictional, design is no longer constrained by the practical reality of todays material and economic restrictions. The part of our curriculum that concentrates on the fictional, pulls important parts of design practice into focus; narrative construction, user interactions, representations of affect, communication and contextualisation. We train designers to become fluent in the operational mechanics of their practice.
"Below is the beginning of a manifesto towards an education that embraces and interrogates the role of fiction in design:
"1. All design is ideological
"The social, cultural and political basis of those ideologies need to be exposed, interpreted and explored. In DF the ideological drive is laid bare for all to see. Deconstructing the economic and political underpinning of design is an essential skill to develop.
"2. Fiction as a testing ground for reality
"As with any practice where contingency is mapped and explored, future ‘scenarios’ lay a framework for possibility...."
