Design Fiction

“The future is no longer regarded as predestined…It is now seen as the result of the decisions, discoveries, and efforts that we make today. The future does not exist, but a limitless number of possible futures can be created.”
(Bell, et al., 2013, p. 5)

A designer is by nature a futurist, designers create ideas that are not yet of this world, and turn those ideas into the world we live in. To design therefore is an exercise in futurity. While designers typically create for the very near future, how often does the designer reflect on the potential worlds they are creating? How often do they question what these futures look like, or more importantly how they should look like? Design fiction is a discipline that offers designers an opportunity to look far into the future. It provides a method to probe, explore, and critique these possible futures and the technologies they embrace. The designer no longer attempts to generate answers, but instead aims to formulate really great questions.

Defining Design Fiction

Design fiction can be understood as both a discipline and a method. Blythe (2014) has attributed the creation of the term to Bruce Sterling from his 2005 book Shaping Things where he first discuses the term, but fails to give a comprehensive definition. Sterling later provides a definition of the term in a 2012 interview with Slate magazine as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” (Bosch, 2012). The diegetic prototype in the context of design fiction can understood as a piece of design/object that seemingly exists within the fictional world the audience is viewing.

There is an important difference between using the term “diegetic prototype” instead of just “prototype” when discussing design fiction. The term diegetic attempts to explain how the reader should understand and relate to these designs in a fiction. Kirby explains that the diegesis, or the world in which these technologies live, create the diegetic prototypes through “dialogue, plot rationalizations, character interactions and narrative structure.”(Kirby, 2010, p.41). Bleecker (2009, p. 85) believes that prototypes in themselves are simply not enough, they present “coherent functionality, but they lack a visionary story about what makes them conversant on important matters-of-concern.” While a prototype exists as a model or representation of some concept, a diegetic prototype exists as a functional piece of technology within a fictional world. A diegetic prototype is…