Tag Archives: Readings

My love hate relationship

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books

So here you are standing at the crossroad junction – Which path do you take? What are the endings and outcome you are seeking for? You settle down to think, maybe a good ending would be nice.. but then a different ending would seem more interesting. Hmm should the star crossed lovers die together? Or maybe kill one of them and have the other alone and always finding hope in the stars. You then get frustrated and throws the book away to a corner.

 

What kind of book is that? You thought to yourself. Who would buy a stupid book with no proper structure to the story and no definite ending? It does gets frustrating when you have to think of how the story goes on your own. Isn’t that why we buy books for? Because we await and anticipate the unknown. We look and explore through the mind and imaginations of the author.

 

Stories are structured and made linear for a reason, probably because we are taught that or maybe it is just a human’s need for structure in our lives. You need to flow through a book from the start and it needs to make sense and tie the entire story back together in the end. Maybe i’m just conventional. But it doesn’t mean I’m not open to a different way or writing or bringing stories together.

 

If you’ve watch Christopher Nolan’s production titled, Inception. Let me just tell you that I was literally mindfu*ked and blown away. Pardon the language. But leaving the ending to our imagination and thoughts was pure genius. At the end of the movie we all found ourselves questioning the movie. Was everything just a dream, or did the main lead manage to finish his task and get back to reality to be with his children? I literally had to watch the movie 4 times to somehow convince myself that my own conclusion was the right one.

 

Changing the structure in texts is a love hate thing. We love something different, something raw and new, yet on the other hand we hate the change. Too much of it makes us uncomfortable and frustrated. There are so many theories to text and writing, and it does prose questions to possiblity of getting things done in different ways. Better ways to encourage creativity and thinking. But is the world ready for that much change? I doubt so. Theories will just be theories, it is something that is required in a educational instituition but not something that currently society will accept just yet.

 

So, thank you for the suggestions. But i’m going to have turn you down. It’s now time for me to sit down, have a cup of tea while I continue reading my favourite selection of conventionally structured books written and explored by my favourite authors.  😉

Design Fiction

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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.