Design Fiction

What do we understand about Design Fiction?

Design Fiction uses fictional scenarios to envision and explain possible futures for design. Sterling spoke about Design Fiction and emphasized that the key term in Design Fiction is neither Design, nor Fiction:  it is diegesis.  His current definition of Design Fiction is that it is “the deliberate use of diegetic  prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”  Diegesis invokes terminology from film studies to refer to “things which are inside the word of the fiction”.

For example: diegetic music in a film would be a song playing on a radio in a scene; non-diegetic music would be underscoring that the audience hears, but which isn’t present in the narrative world.  When Sterling references diegetic prototypes he is invoking a concept by film scholar David Kirby that has also been referenced by Julian Bleecker.

Kirby on the other hand uses the term diegetic prototypes to “account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence”.  This is a central aspect of design fiction:  it uses a fictional frame to make an argument about a potential future by demonstrating that future in a context that a large public audience can understand.

A common example of design fiction that many people understand is the gestural interfaces in the Spielberg Film Minority Report.  Gestural interfaces had been around and viable for years but there was no narrative to drive their use. The film gave the public a concrete narrative of gestural interaction that was compelling and memorable.

A design fiction has to imagine a culture of use for a technology or design that has implications for how it is executed and built.  Using fiction to frame design also affords the consideration of the values, meanings, and implications of the design from an ethical and political standpoint, often highlighting social elements of a design’s use and potential misuse.

 

What’s a blog?

Blogs appear on the news pretty often these days. For example, a reporter is tipped to a story by a blog, or a blog reports another angle on a story. Blogs show up in magazines a lot, too. What are blogs? There are now millions of them — where did they all come from?

One of the things that is so amazing about blogs is their simplicity.

Think about a “normal Web site.” It usually has a home page, with links to lots of sub-pages that have more detail. Most traditional Web sites follow this format. If the site is small, it is sort of like an online brochure. If it is large, it is like an electronic encyclopedia.

A typical Web site has a home page that links to sub-pages within the site. CNN.com is typical of this genre. The CNN site contains thousands of articles all organized into big categories. The categories and all the latest stories are accessed from the home page.

A blog is much much simpler:

  • A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the “main page” of a blog is all anyone really cares about.
  • A blog is organized in reverse-chronological order, from most recent entry to least recent.
  • A blog is normally public — the whole world can see it.
  • The entries in a blog usually come from a single author.
  • The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.

In this article, you will have a chance to enter the world of blogging. You will even learn how to create your own blog and publish it to the world.

Readings week 1

This weeks readings talk about various methods of learning and observation situations. I learnt that through the purpose of noticing we are able to be impartial in situations and when the time comes to make decisions we won’t be swayed. It is said that in the readings that during discussions or decision making we tend to be more clouded in our choices and thoughts when we already have a structured ideology in mind. It is through noticing,evaluating and reflecting on our ideas that the chances of us making a more appropriate thought or action would seem clearer and make more sense. Now, when we take what we’ve read in the previous reading and then apply it to blogging we realise that what we put out onto the internet is clearly noticed and seen by many worldwide. And this is something that is not within our control. What we can control is, the contents that we put out there onto the world wide web and maybe setting up our spam filter. However, evaluating the contents written before posting it would be a wise option, it is something clearly within our control and can contain.

Week 1.1 workshop

 

First day of networked media was honestly really dry. I found it too technical, not too much to my liking. Why should I be learning about Networking media. I know the internet is like the biggest source of networking but all these technical applications that I would learn about, read about or talk about – Would I even use them or take them with me when I enter the work force? Maybe because it’s the first class and the fact that I just got back from vacation makes me feel edgy about going to class during summer. But I’ll keep an open mind and look forward to whatever new insights and lessons that I’ll be learning ahead. Starting the blog today is a first step and I look forward to the next class on Wednesday! It’s gona be a mad rush during the 6 weeks but I hope it ends as quickly as soon as it came. In an enjoyable way of course!