NM Week 2.1 – Design Fiction as Pedagogy

Matthew Ward says ‘all design is fiction’ a phrase though seemingly obvious, was at this point, unarticulated in my own mind. However, in the context of design fiction, “a testing ground for reality”, we are not asked so much to think of next-season’s fashion, as it were, but rather make an extra step into a world of practical and aesthetic possibility, while simultaneously making rational and informed decisions about the real-world implementation of the idea. To put it in an old cliche, ‘Imagine the World of Tomorrow, Today’, though include the caveat that if you want the world of tomorrow, make sure you can pitch it as a convincing powerpoint to those with the money.This represents a curious doublethink that is necessary to engage with design fiction. On one hand, let your imagination run wild, on the other, make sure that your idea is grounded enough in possibility to be attractive.

Ward makes a few more good points about how to approach design fiction and that one of the central ideas to DF is the idea of storytelling. “What world will this invention be a part of”? Ward goes on to say that good ideas do not in themselves create narrative, so there is an extra impetuous placed on how we are to go about embedding the idea in people’s imagination. In an oblique acknowledgement of the importance of narrative, sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson, mentioned in the last post, works as a consultant for a high-tech firm, specifically in the context of being a fiction-writing designer.

As humans are faced with the very real likelihood of having to do more and more with less, there seems to be a very real future for design fiction.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *