Tagged: design fiction

I’m a hyperhypo

  • I’m feeling thoroughly confused about hypertext the more I read about it. To me it seems like it is one of those things that you have to be enveloped in to understand – from the examples I’ve read online I feel I have an understanding of what hypertext is, however the theory surrounding it is exhausting.
  • I gather the non-linear aspect and the challenging of the narrative and the literary form – something I find quite interesting and amazing: how can people make these beautiful and intricate stories that can be read like a pretzel and still make sense?! But personally I’m still drawn to the story as a having a distinct thread, a definitive sense of change and growth, however I’m willing to admit that that may be simply because that’s all I’ve ever been taught before: the linear is ingrained just as the essay, just as the one size fits all approach to education.
  • A big design fiction-esque question raised in Landow‘s piece on hypertext is how it might affect the literary form. Blogs may be a perfect form to me at the moment. I love the idea of being able to read a piece with a definitive beginning and ending, yet also given the option to explore within the story. I can come back to the section I was up to, or I can read from start to end and then go through the 57 tabs I opened.
  • I like the idea that “hypertext … makes certain elements … stand out the first time” – going back to the blog example, there’s something about the blue underlined text that encapsulates the same way the yellow highlighted section in a reading does.
  • “Hypertext story space is multidimensional and theoretically infinite.”
  • Sometimes I finally feel like I understand hypertext, then go on a website devoted to a hypertext story and all I feel is welling rage and fury because I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
  • I’m trying to remember that it’s not broken just because it’s uncomfortable, to make it relevant, and just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s ‘bad’, but this is a hard practice when my precious scaffolding of beginning, middle, end is taken away. I’m acknowledging I like the scaffolding.
  • Ok breathe Zo, breathe. Douglas‘ explanation of the Titanic choose-your-own-adventure actually sounds really cool: “It is 9.30PM: you have slightly more than four hours to wend your way through a series of tortuous plots and subplots, deciding which to follow and which to bypass, before the ship begins her plunge to the ocean floor.”
  • Hmm, perhaps hypertext has a place in theme park type scenarios? What if that Titanic CD-ROM could be played out in a theme park inside a huge ship, with its “elegiac music,” “eight decks of public rooms” and “well-written characters”.
  • I’m intrigued by Douglas’ question of whether future readers will read print works differently to how they do now with the increase in interactive mediums. This is very interesting, and now I am recalling my feelings of inadequacy at predicting the future. I’m sure it’s true that I listen to a vinyl record differently to how my father would have in the 70s – I can pick the differences between the vinyl and an mp3, which I am accustomed to, with ease. I too wonder what specifics will be picked up when future readers read a print text, just as I can get transfixed on the sound of the needle being placed on a record, or that unique sound of dust that doesn’t exist in a digital rendering.
  • Ok, off to have hypertext dreams.

 

SYMPOSIUM TAKEOUT

Honestly I was surprised the question of why the concept of design fiction is relevant is still being asked. I actually wrote ‘this is outrageous’ in my notes… All media is, is creativity and imagination, surely.

To think about this week:

  1. Sense of play: not necessarily evidence-based; can make you reassess what counts as evidence
  2. Problems with no answers: any ‘solution’ will create a new problem, eg asylum seeker policy, climate change policy; we need to be able to think through possibilities and imagine futures.
  3. Design as a completely future-oriented subject: design is about changing things for the future.
  4. The traditional model of repeating what we did yesterday is irrelevant: however obviously grounding in current practices is important for doing an speculative thinking.
  5. It’s also important to look BACK: history is a creative wellspring; are we living in a remixed culture?
  6. Context is important for success: eg, 12 second video was three years too early, Vine now a great success; perhaps being ‘before your time’ is not necessarily a good thing.
  7. Everything has agency, everything is an actor, everything can assume change on the environment.

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.