Tagged: deigetic prototypes

Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction

“Fiction allows you to live more lives in the space-time of one lifetime than you would normally be able to.”

MIT researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner argue that the mind-bending worlds of authors such as Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke can help us not just come up with ideas for new gadgets, but anticipate their consequences.

How will police use a gun that immobilizes its target but does not kill? What would people do with a device that could provide them with any mood they desire? What are the consequences of a massive, instant global communications network?

Such questions are relevant to many technologies on the market today, but their first iterations appeared not in lab prototypes but in the pages of science fiction.

The Fluid Interfaces group’s “Flexpad” (MIT)

This fall, MIT Media Lab researchers Dan Novy and Sophia Brueckner are teaching “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication,” aka “Pulp to Prototype,” a course that mines these “fantastic imaginings of the future” for analysis of our very real present.

Read more here.

Thinking, as we may.

Dr Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think‘ is another article that has amazed me on some clever individuals’ forward thinking, a true testament to WHAT IF.

It’s also made me think about more recent possibilities that has come about because someone was brave enough to imagine and see their idea come to fruition.

– Using Banana Peels in the Production of Bio-Plastic as a Replacement for Traditional Petroleum-Based Plastic

– Simultaneous Biopesticide Wastewater Treatment and Bioelectricity Generation in Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)

– The Hand Warmth Flashlight

Aside from these girls, Elif Bilgin, S.M. Sambavi and Ann Makosinski respectively, (all 16 or younger) making me feel extremely inadequate, they are outrageously inspiring.

Never stop spinning.

More thoughts on Design Fictions feat. Bruce Sterling

Design fiction:

  • an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling
  • the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change

Some examples of this diegetic prototyping, also described as the fictional making as a way to think about real things, can be found on the aptly named Tumblr: Diegetic Prototypes.

I particularly like the ‘Robot readable world’ video below, which has immediately sparked numerous ‘What if?’s and ‘How can we use this?’s and ‘What about if?’s, so despite some trepidation in reading about diegetic prototyping, I think I might be a convert after seeing some examples.

Robot readable world on Vimeo

 

 

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Writing about hypertext by writing in hypertext, or:

the only way to learn how to ride a bike is by riding a bike.

… to unify and and organize in the right way, so as to clarify and simplify our computer and working lives, and indeed to bring literature, science, art and civilization to new heights of understanding, through hypertext.

The ‘cloud’ we use, both cloud services and file sharing services, as well as the ….. sphere of endless websites all linking, borrowing and reappropriating each other ….. however Nelson’s article also makes it clear how far there is to go.

What if, what if, what if! Certainly there are also endless opportunities to revolutionise and keep literature, science, art and civilisation evolving as new service emerge out of ideas born from design fiction and diegetic prototypes.

 

This diagram from the reading shows the concept of moving from hard copy to soft copy, and I think a modern equivalent to some extent is Ancestry.com – a website specialising in making hard copy documents available online (for a price).

In fact this reading is quite prophetic, expecting the increase in cloud-like software and even the changes in organisations such as schools and universities. What is most terrifying is perhaps that 2020, the year that Nelson asked readers to imagine as far off in to the future, is now not so far away at all. But undoubtedly even in the next mere seven years, what technologies and gadgets that will be used most prolifically haven’t even been conceived yet.