Week 14: Speculative & Critical Fiction
Task: Here’s a mission for you: try your hand at a brief speculative fiction or small critical design project about a near future object. Warning that it’s harder than it seems. Set your scene properly, think about the design language you use, and place it in a scene in time and space.
I just imagined a speculative situation about how our value could change when autonomous cars become widely prevalent. (I’m not sure it can be called critical design or speculative fiction…)
It’s 2027. Only autonomous transportations are permitted to drive on the road. But people still enjoy bike or automobiles for sports. People who want to enjoy driving a car should go to ‘Driving Park’, where they have to pay for the experience of driving a car. People can enjoy a feeling of controlling cars that they cannot enjoy in normal days.
Autonomous cars are able to detect and calculate the nearby objects accurately, which has reduced the car accident rate after 2020. Also, the autonomous cars are so smart that they could calculate the expected damages or injuries. It always minimizes the damage of accident, but this feature causes unexpected social issues — abandoning safety equipment.
Even though it is illegal, no one wants to put on safety equipment, such as a helmet, when they ride bikes, automobiles, or even walk. Since autonomous cars give low-risk scores to whom with safety equipment, ironically, they become the priority target to minimize the damage of injuries when the accident is inevitable. As the recent statistics shows, most victims or casualties are honest people who put on required safety gadgets. Among people, helmets began to be called ‘Suicide Cap’. On the road with smart cars, the most unsafe person become the safest person.
- Paola Antonelli, “States of Design 04: Critical Design,” Domus 949 (July/August 2011).
- Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything, excerpts (ch. 1–3). [Box]
- Debate that took place around the Republic of Salivation (Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta) project in the Design and Violence exhibition at MoMA
