unfinished business design fiction lecture @ ocad
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Unfinished Business Lecture - Design Fiction: Provoking the Future by Making It (September 29, 2010 from 5:45 pm to 7:30 pm) Unfinished Business Events are designed by Torch Innovation and Normative Design and sponsored by the Strategic Innovation Lab at OCAD. Could we have had the iPhone without Star Trek? Can we create the next innovation without thinking about other possible worlds? What are we making out of our imaginations that will shape what’s next? As an emerging area of thought and practice, Design Fiction provides us with a way of “thinking about doing what we see and imagine”. By making models or prototypes of the future, we expose, test and probe further into it, exploring scenarios as use cases, as they are assumptions about the future made reality. Scott Smith of Changeist will take us on a journey to see where Design Fiction has come from, its impact on a generation unwittingly raised on it, and how designers, creatives, strategists, and other future-minded professions among us are applying it to actively provoke possible futures that we prefer.TRANSCRIPT
Scott SmithChangeistUnfinished Business Lecture @ OCAD USeptember 29, 2010#designfiction
www.changeist.com
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
