Event Takeaways
Practicing the Future: Science Fiction may not be able to perfectly predict the future, but it allows its authors to explore what the future may hold, and immerse its audience and creators in the implications therein.
Imagination Value: Don’t let a focus on data, analytics, and evidence sideline imagination in the design process.
Assess, Synthesize, Imagine, Create: Build structure for your imagination, place it within real and rational constraints to create relatable design.
Grounded in an Alternate Reality: Engage with the stories your designs tell, ponder and explore all of its potentials and hidden implications to encourage innovation.
Augment Reality: Use Design Fiction to add life, colour, and substance to analytics in a way that will make the future real and relatable to your audience.
Joining a video call is so normalized it’s hard to remember that it’s a holdover from a worldwide pandemic that caused city-wide lockdowns; a scenario that serves as the introduction to countless Sci-Fi stories.
While most Sci-Fi pandemics tend to cause societal collapse, ours brought us a new platform for communication.
And this is exactly what this month’s presentation was all about, when Ian Chalmers of Pivot Design Group hosted Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory to discuss Design Fiction; an adoption of of Science Fiction to the work of Innovation that explores the future, the potential realities that reside in it, and how science-fiction can inform design.
Near Future Laboratory
Bleecker holds three degrees, a BS in Electrical Engineering, a MSEng in Human Computer Interaction, and a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness, and it is the blend of these, or the challenge of blending them, that led to the creation of Near Future Laboratory.
Near Future Laboratory is a creative design, innovation, and technology studio that specialises in making sense of the unpredictable environment in which organizations operate.
With clients ranging from world-class universities to world-wide brands like Meta and Apple, Near Future Laboratory helps unlock creativity to drive growth and innovation by keeping it grounded in practical contexts.
All alongside a podcast, two seminar series, and the occasional trip to the future for some souvenir hunting, of course.
Design Fiction
Julian began by introducing us to some of Near Future Laboratory’s atypical artefacts: a cricket-based breakfast cereal, a booklet about android psyches, and a catalog from the IKEA of tomorrow.
He explains that just as ancient artefacts tell a story and force the imagination to ponder the past, holding in your hands, physically, a box of Cricket Crunch forces you to ponder the future that it has been retrieved from.
This is the goal of Design Fiction.
Defined as ‘the creation of tangible prototypes for the material objects of the near future,’ Design Fiction lends structure to imagination. It creates a methodological way to create and reflect on possible futures by creating thought provoking works of fiction that give us a glimpse of what the future could hold, and the creation of these objects allows for the practicing of the future in a very real sense.
ASIC
‘Every process needs a mnemonic,’ Julian explains, for the act of Design Fiction, he chose a four step framework of Assess, Synthesize, Imagine, and Create.
The Assessment step is not an unfamiliar one; desk research, trend analysis, interviews all contribute to identifying the context in which a topic exists. As this research is being conducted, the mind continues to ask questions about the possible social, technological, environmental, political causal factors that might influence things in a near future.
The approach requires that you give up on the idea of predicting, focusing instead on wondering.
Synthesizing sees you organize all of these thoughts and all of this data, typically into a report. In this way creating structure and building a framework around the question of ‘what if?’
This reporting lends structure to Imagine within. Ask ‘what would this look like?’ amongst the realities and implications that all of your research has provided. Imagine how all of your analysis appears in a near future world.
Once you have imagined a world where these implications exist, Create representations that tell the story of this world in a real and tangible way to spark imagination and create conversation.
Design Fiction is the creation of artefacts that augment the analytics, demonstrating in a relatable way exactly what that analysis means for the future, drawing its audience into a world in a way that a traditional analytical approach cannot. Through this process, Design Fiction blends analysis and imagination, evidence and creativity, in a relatable way that introduces comfort to uncertainty.
Q & A with Julian Bleecker
The presentation closed with Julian fielding questions from the group, which centered around the finer details of Design Fiction, and how it interacts with changes in technology.
Generative AI seems to be just the perfect tool for Design Fiction, doesn't it? – Alex
'There are some people who use it to create images, which is cool. I use it a lot to create images, but Design Fiction is not the image, it is much richer than that.
I think it should be a physical artefact, you need to go through, as designers will know, the craft of actually making the thing.’
The creation of the physical artefacts comes with its own restraints and requirements, which go on to augment the artefact itself and add greater texture to the story it tells, as the final object is inevitably altered; for instance 2 extra pages of junk ads used to fill up the remnant space when printing a magazine.
This same emphasis on creation served to answer a follow-up question on feasibility and viability – that these very challenges form part of the world the artefact originates from, and exert their influence on the final product.
What time horizon do you like to play in? A hundred years in the future, a thousand? – Stuart
‘I don’t use time; I maintain as little structure as possible. The structure is the artifact. And if I'm an archaeologist travelling to the future, I even say this: that little dial that sets the time machine, it's broken.’
‘We just push the button, and see where we end up.’
Within the practice of imagining futures through the lens of Design Fiction, how important is the idea of imagining utopia, dystopia, ecotopia, protopia?
‘It's kind of like the timeline question, as clients will want something that's grounded in the world that they can understand.’ You don’t place your artefacts in a deliberately fantastic world, but rather one that already speaks their language, that brings an element of comfort into these explorations of the unknown, ‘grounded realities, grounded possibilities.’
These “-topias” are like North Stars, beckoning us depending on our disposition. We’re trying to imagine into a world that is full of contingent factors, that feels like a world in which multiple adjacencent ontologies are simultaneous. One person’s idea of a “perfect place” or an “ecologically vibrant place” is another person’s idea of hell. How do you hold all of that together simultaneously? That is the work necessary to ground a superlative Design Fiction such that it feels not only ‘of the world’ but opens up a sense of curiosity and wonder.
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About Design Meets
Proudly sponsored by Pivot Design Group, founded by Ian Chalmers, DesignMeets is a series of social events where the design community can connect, collaborate, and share ideas. Join us at a DesignMeets event to network, learn, and be inspired.
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