Insights: Nicolas Nova
On the occasion of our participation at Lift15 in Geneva in February 2015, we asked Lisa Ma, Régine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art) and Nicolas Nova (Near Future Laboratory) to tell us a bit more about their works, methods and share the experience they get from them. This is the first piece of “Insights” a series of three interviews crossing the themes of thinking, activism and speculation through design.
Hello Nicolas, can you introduce yourself?
My name is Nicolas Nova, I’m a professor at Geneva University of Art and Design. I’m also the cofounder of the Near Future Laboratory, a small design consultancy based in Europe and in the US. I was one of the co-founders of Lift Conference and now I’m working as an editorial consultant for this series of conferences about digital technologies and innovation.
You are working on future exploration with Near Future Laboratory. How speculation is incorporated in your work?
For quite a time, I have been interested in foresight; futures research and in this idea that we can’t predict, but anticipate and speculate on near future worlds. As I grew interested in design and how designers work, I thought there would be a nice connection between these two fields, future and design. With my colleagues, Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin and Nick Foster, at the Near Future Laboratory, we began to be interested in design fiction. We started to investigate how design can help to materialize and to make tangible scenarios about a near future by using very mundane artefacts that we can craft and design. We work on projects using catalogs or newspapers for instance, which are objects that could be designed to exemplify and to materialize these scenarios about possible futures for clients as well as for our own projects.
You were talking about foresight studies, which remain generally quite polished and theoretical. What is your interest in using design fiction methods when it comes to deal with possible futures?
Our interest is not to focus on abstract and theoretical perspectives, but rather to make people conscious about certain changes. It can be technological changes, social changes or political changes. This goal makes us to think about the right artefact or the right format to start a discussion with people about these stakes. When I say people, I mean citizens or regular people in the street, not specialists. It means we are interested in very mundane and banal type of artefacts to create this discussion. It’s not necessarily about making people believe that these things have already happened in reality, with a fictional application for example, but to raise awareness that there are weird possibilities and changes going on. And they should definitely think and talk about it.
To contrast with other design perspectives, I think design fiction is a bit different from critical design, which is a bit more abstract and theoretical compared to our own interest in design happening outside of galleries or museums. Design fiction is rather tackling a future-oriented problem with an everyday object to address it to anyone who could be concerned in few years.
How do you engage this public into a discussion? Are you trying to foster conversations?
This is the tricky part of the process because it is related to the distribution of our work. Maybe one of the best projects exploring this is a collaboration we had with the Museum of Soccer in Manchester. It was a project about near futures of sports, especially soccer, and how they could be influenced by big data or data visualisation. For this, we had a partnership with a newspaper in Manchester that we reproduced as a fictional magazine and which was then distributed with the original newspaper. People who bought the newspaper had the opportunity to look at the material we created. My colleagues had the chance to talk with the people who read this material and to discuss the different implication of crossing sport and data.
That being said, engaging people remains difficult because you need to go to where they live and you have to create arenas and moments for this kind of discussion. From our expertise, we think it is mandatory to meet the public before starting to design future scenarios. But when it comes to bring the products to the public, the diffusion beat and the communication beat are things we are still struggling to manage. Of course, we can put things on the Web, which could create discussion, but personally I don’t think it’s enough. Doing so means your production is only circulating around for a certain kind of public. There is still room for improvement to reach a broader audience.
Which kind of improvement could be brought? Should we look at methods and tools borrowed from public debate or ethnography?
I’m working with clients who are involved with projects related to public debate. The fact that some political debates are led by some associations or political forces, somehow, pushes the debate in a specific direction. I’m interested in how we could make it a bit more neutral.
An option could be to meet people randomly, which is something I’m fascinated about.
A bit like we did with the sports newspaper or our future objects catalog, it could be leaving an artefact in a train and see what happens. So here, it’s not necessary to gather a large group of representative people, it’s just about creating an unexpected encounter between our work and people who would have not discovered it otherwise.
Back to your question about ethnography, my own ethnographic practice is more about understanding people’s behavior, people’s habits and their rituals, with technologies, for example. I don’t use ethnographic methods after the production of a design fiction, but mostly before as a way to feed the design process. However, there is surely something interesting to think about, in terms of getting back to the people who shaped our perspective about the future and to explain what we did with all their insights. There is also room for improvement on that side.
We were talking about engaging people and giving them to see fictions that you are producing, which kind of impact are you trying to achieve through your work? Is that about making the public think about the situation or to make them stepping into action?
Our ambition is quite low since we know it’s really hard to have a co-created and pragmatic impact in terms of action. So our first aim is to raise questions, issues and attention about technological and social changes. Then, if a debate can happen about that, even in a small circle, this is fantastic, but not necessarily easy.
For the action beat, that depends on the situation. We operate with different kinds of contracts.
On one side, we have our own personal projects with Near Future Laboratory, for which we try to save some time, but it’s hard when this time has to be devoted to clients. One of the limits I have encountered with clients is that at some point you can’t keep building discussions with the public, as there is no budget to continue to do so. As much as we try to go further with debates and try to look forward to have a pragmatic impact, at some point we still have to stop and to jump on another client work. This is one of the biggest frustrations, as we operate as consultants, the allowed timeframe is quite short. It’s difficult for us to go beyond the project and to see how we can make change happen or put simply what are the results of a project. Maybe it would be different if we were working inside the company, with the opportunity to include follow-ups in the whole process. This is a frustration I share with other peers working in similar contexts, sadly.
Speaking of limits and frustration, as designers, we are evolving in a world of metrics where evaluating our work is mandatory.
What do you think about evaluating design fiction or speculative design? Should it be even evaluated? How would you proceed?
It depends of what we understand as evaluation. If it’s about evaluating the impact of a design fiction, checking if this project has a real impact, I’m kind of dubious about it because we don’t know how it should be done. Now, it doesn’t mean that there should not be any criteria to evaluate the quality of a design fiction project. For instance, it could be about its importance, its relevance or its plausibility, technologically or socially speaking. If evaluation is about checking the way it had an impact afterwards, say, for an organisation, we have to admit changes don’t happen overnight. You have to build over time and you need to convince people, inside the organisation and outside of the organisation. I don’t know if there are right metrics for that. This remark is not only about design fiction, but is also true for any type of consultancy.
I understand organisations need to be cautious about their investments and it might be risky to pursue some kinds of future-related projects, but working with design fiction is a risk anyway. You might need to try to adapt or to change according to these future perspectives.
Again, for me there is no real metric at this point, but if you talk to people in corporate institutions, the discourse might be quite different, I guess.
Wrapping it up, what are your next steps or projects?
We did this project called To Be Designed, a fictional catalog of connected objects. Now, we are trying to build something based on the follow-up discussions we had after the catalog. We want to produce something around the Internet of Things. We thought about designing a manual for an exhibition, that never happened, but it seems we are moving forward from this and we are building something else with this kind of material.
Aside design fiction projects, I’m also leading an ethnographic study of algorithmic culture, understanding how algorithms affect and influence everyday culture. It’s going to be published during this summer as a special publication for a Swiss graphic design magazine.
Nicolas Nova is also blogging on Pasta and Vinegar.
