unfinished business design fiction lecture @ ocad

Scott SmithChangeistUnfinished Business Lecture @ OCAD USeptember 29, 2010#designfiction

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Design Fiction: Provoking the Future by

Making It

About Me

Design Foresight

Strategy

How do design, our imagination and

science fiction interact?

Made in 1967, from 1963 novel La Planète des Singes by Pierre Boulle

Made in 1971, from 1954 novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

PADD, Star Trek Next Generation

That’s all nice, but how do we make the future happen more often?

FuturePast

Fact

Fiction

Histories

Myths

Signals

Scenarios

Brain Centers

People who could touch something, instead of just hear or read about it, were 50% more likely to select the “experienced” item. — Caltech research

What’s Design Fiction got to do with it?

• Design fiction attempts “to correct for the limitations in how we think about the future”.– Jake Dunagan, Institute for the Future

“…Science fictiondoes not merely anticipate but actively shapes technological futures through its effect on the collective imagination.”

-Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, “Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing

“Design seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls—scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design.”

-Bruce Sterling, Interactions magazine, May/June 2009

“How can design participate inshaping possible near future worlds?

How can the integration of story telling,technology, art and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future?

How does the material act of making and crafting things— real, material objects — shape how we think about what is possible and how we think about what should be possible?”

-Julian Bleecker, Near Future Laboratory

Design and Existential Risk: http://designexrisk.wordpress.com/

≠We can’t keep trying to rewrite the script to make our desired endings come true (good or bad). If we have our own points of view—if we OWN the future—we can use our powers of synthesis to keep rewriting and rethinking these style manuals, and make new artifacts to test their physics.

Globalization

Fragmentation

Low Growth

High Growth

The Long Boom

Divided World

Hard Times

Perfect Storm

ACTIVEFUTURES=

Fringe, Season Two

The Other Side Our Side

Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, Found Futures Project

www.the-salvare.com.

BERG London http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/12/the-ghost-in-the-field/

Prototyping around known needs and capabilities

Prototyping around

unknown needs and

possibilities

Not just asking, but making, “what ifs”.

Finding the loosely distributed pieces

Design/Foresight

Futurehacking/“GuerillaFutures”Strateg

ic Design/Strategic Foresight

Futurejacking

What the future will do to you

What you will do to the future

Now Hiring

The future won’t write itself.

Design Foresight

Strategy

Further Reading

• Julian Bleecker — http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/

• Nicolas Nova — http://www.liftlab.com/think/nova/• Bruce Sterling —

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/category/design-fiction/

• Stuart Candy — http://futuryst.blogspot.com/• Jake Dunagan — http://www.iftf.org• Matt Jones — http://magicalnihilism.com/• Jason Tester — http://www.iftf.org/blog/14

Scott Smithssmith@changeist.comwww.changeist.com

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