Design fiction is a way to provoke and shape possible futures through the creation of artifacts and scenarios that make technological ideas feel realistic and concrete. By materializing speculative concepts through prototypes and stories, design fiction can influence popular imagination and help bring imagined futures into reality. It moves beyond just discussing or envisioning the future to actively designing possible worlds through a combination of design, technology, art, and storytelling. Design fiction aims to expand what people see as plausible and desirable technological outcomes rather than just predict or extrapolate from the present.

1. Design Fiction: Provoking the Future by Making It Scott Smith Changeist Unfinished Business Lecture @ OCAD U September 29, 2010 #designfiction www.changeist.com

2. About Me

3. Design Foresight Strategy

4. How do design, our imagination and science fiction interact?

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

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

12. PADD, Star Trek Next Generation

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

16. Fact Histories Signals Future Past Myths Scenarios Fiction

17. Brain Centers

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

19. What’s Design Fiction got to do with it?

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

21. “…Science fiction does 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

22. “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

23. “How can design participate in shaping 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

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

25. ≠ 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.

27. Globalization The Long Boom Hard Times High Growth Low Growth Divided World Perfect Storm Fragmentation

28. ACTIVE FUTURES =

30. Fringe, Season Two

31. The Other Side Our Side

32. Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, Found Futures Project

35. www.the-salvare.com.

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

38. Prototyping around unknown needs and possibilities Prototyping around known needs and capabilities

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

40. Finding the loosely distributed pieces

41. Futurejacking Futurehacking/ “Guerilla Futures” Strategic Design/ Strategic Foresight Design/ Foresight

42. What the future will do to you What you will do to the future

43. Now Hiring

44. The future won’t write itself.

45. Design Foresight Strategy

46. 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

47. Scott Smith ssmith@changeist.com www.changeist.com @changeist