one of the readings this week was about design fiction. what is design fiction you ask? i’m still not entirely sure of a full and proper definition but here’s the one given in the interview: “It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. ” (the interview blog can be found here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html).

kinda confusing but as i continued reading i began to understand a bit more (just a bit). that design fiction is creating things that we don’t have. kinda. i know what i mean. i just can’t really get it into words.like a prototype for something that hasn’t been made yet. like the hover boards in back to the future 2 (which i’m still very upset that we don’t have yet, btw. even if it did struggle over water).

what i don’t get is whether design fiction is supposed to simply remain just that, fiction, or whether it’s to be used as a method for innovation and the creation of new technologies. like that “a day made of glass” video that was featured in the post. is it made purely as fiction, for people to watch and wish for, or as something that will hopefully become a reality one day? coz that glass stuff was cool. although you’d probably get a bit sick of everything being see through all the time. that world was very bright. but all the intense touch screen stuff was great.

one of the other things mentioned in the article as design fiction   was the apparent iPad’s that can be seen in the 1968 movie “2001: a space odyssey”. for one, those didn’t really look too much like iPads.they were just big square things that were showing a video. although i guess that’s essentially what an iPad is. but there’s been stuff like that in every sci-fi show you can see on tv. star trek has a bunch of technology that didn’t exist when the show was made. (kudos to arthur. i got that great star trek meme from his blog. loved it so much i wanted to include it in mine too).

another example that came to mind was the thunderbirds. another old sci-fi show, thunderbirds had a bunch of awesome technology, some of which actually exists now today that didn’t back then – such as sliding doors (no not the movie, i mean doors that open when someone approaches them). no, we still don’t have those awesome hovercraft things that they used to cut that family out of the burning building, but maybe one day we will. i think that is the point of design fiction. innovative thinking and use of media and technologies to create things that we used to only be ably to dream about. and who knows, maybe one day soon we’ll all be moving about on hover boards, wearing shoes that tie their own laces and jackets that dry us off if we happen to fall into a lake because the hover board couldn’t get us across.