Design Fictions Week 2

Remember to use:

Writing / Editing Guidelines

posted on the Design Fictions blog:

http://syelavich.wordpress.com/

Avoid “absolutes”

• Everyone knows that all fats are harmful to your health.

• Children always like to play in the sand.

• This street never has any traffic.

Metaphor• An implied comparison between two unlike

things that actually have something in common. A metaphor can expresses the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.

• “Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.” (Nicholson Baker)

• “All the world’s a stage.” (Shakespeare)

•

Simile

• Uses “like” or “as” to make a comparison.

•   "Life is like an onion: You peel it off one

layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."(Carl Sandburg)

•  • "He looked about as inconspicuous as a

tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."(Raymond Chandler)

Talking Objects:

The Role of Narrative in Design

KEY IDEAS:agency, intentionality, aesthetics, product

semantics, mediation, multi-stability of objects,

co-creation

Orhan Pamuk

Hansje van Halem

Type Jockey, 2008/09

Andrea Tinnes

Speechless, 1996

Shirin Neshat

Hans Christian Andersen

What Things DoPeter-Paul Verbeek

• KEY IDEAS:• agency• intentionality• aesthetics• product semantics• mediation • multi-stability of objects• co-creation

• TOWARD a theory of the moral agency of things

Post-Phenomenology

• “…a way to probe and analyze the role of technologies in social, personal, and cultural life … [undertaken] by concrete—empirical—studies of technologies in the plural.”

• Don Ihde, Phenomology and Technoscience, 23.

• When things are used, people take up a relation to the world that these things, thanks to their “handiness,” co-shape.

• In this sense…human-world relations [are] … mediated by … products.

Verbeek, What Things Do, 211.

• on hybrid Intentionality: “These mediated experiences are not entirely human.” Verbeek,

Moralizing Technology, 50.

N.B. italics are mine.

• Moralizing objects by design

• Objections?

• Verbeek’s critique of the objections?

• How does the multi-stability of objects factor into his critique?

• “The postphenomenological perspective allow[s] designers to approach human habits concerning product disposal as something wherein the products themselves play an active role –and therefore changeable—role.”

• Verbeek, What Things Do, 218.

Critical DesignDunne & Raby

Human Poo Energy Future, 2004

This project is a Critical Design experiment commissioned by the [London] Science Museum exploring different energy futures. We chose to design a collection of hypothetical products to explore the ethical, cultural and social impact of different energy futures. The scenarios include: domestic hydrogen production and child labour with specially designed family uniforms and corporate logos; bio-fuel created from the [blood of pets] and human waste. Each scenario is based on a real technology and asks what would happen if this became the main form of energy in the not too distant future.

Utility Pets: Smoke EaterElio Caccavale, 2004-05

Why do I exist?What’s different about me?