Design fiction

Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts. It is a way to facilitate and foster debates, as explained by futurist Scott Smith: '... design fiction as a communication and social object creates interactions and dialogues around futures that were missing before. It helps make it real enough for people that you can have a meaningful conversation with'. Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts. It is a way to facilitate and foster debates, as explained by futurist Scott Smith: '... design fiction as a communication and social object creates interactions and dialogues around futures that were missing before. It helps make it real enough for people that you can have a meaningful conversation with'. By inspiring new imaginaries about the future, Design Fiction moves forward innovation perspectives, as conveyed by author Bruce Sterling's own definition: 'Design Fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change'. Reflecting the diversity of media used to create design fictions and the breadth of concepts that are prototyped in the associated fictional worlds, researchers Joseph Lindley and Paul Coulton propose that design fiction be defined as: '(1) something that creates a story world, (2) has something being prototyped within that story world, (3) does so in order to create a discursive space', where 'something' may mean 'anything'. Examples of the media used to create design fiction storyworlds include physical prototypes, prototypes of user manuals, digital applications, videos, short stories, comics, fictional crowdfunding videos, fictional documentaries, catalogues or newspapers and pastiches of academic papers and abstracts. Design fiction is part of the speculative design discipline, itself a relative of critical design. Although the term design fiction was coined by Bruce Sterling in 2005, where he says it is similar to science fiction but 'makes more sense on the page', it was Julian Bleecker's 2009 essay that firmly established the idea. Bleecker brought together Sterling's original idea and combined it with David A. Kirby's notion of the diegetic prototype and a paper written by influential researchers Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell which argued reading science fiction alongside Ubiquitous Computing research would shed further light on both areas. Since Bleecker's essay was published design fiction has become increasingly popular as demonstrated by the adoption of design fiction in a wide variety of academic research. Although design fiction shows a lot of overlaps with other Discursive Design practices such as critical design, Adversarial Design, Interrogative Design, Design for Debate, reflective design, and contestational design, it is possible to draw some of its special features.