Design fiction, "anticipatory ethnography" and "ethnographies of the possible"

My interest in design fiction has always been related to my ethnographic practice (see for instance this piece about it) which is why I find it interesting to run into these two notions :

"Ethnographies of the possible", coined by Joachim Halse (2013):

"are a way of materializing ideas, concerns and speculations through committed ethnographic attention to the people potentially affected by them. It is about crafting accounts that link the imagination to its material forms. And it is about creating artifacts that allow participants to revitalize their pasts, reflect upon the present, and extrapolate into possible futures. These ambitions lie at the borderland between design and anthropology. For designers involved in this type of process, it is a new challenge to craft not beautiful and convincing artifacts, but evocative and open-ended materials for further experimentation in collaboration with non-designers. For anthropologists, it is a new challenge to creatively set the scene for a distorted here and now with a particular direction as a first, but important step toward exploring particular imaginative horizons in concrete ways."

Halse, J. (2013). "Ethnographies of the possible", in Gunn, W., Otto, T. & Smith, R.C. (eds). Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice, Bloomsbury, pp. 180-196.

"Anticipatory ethnography", proposed by Lindley and Sharma:

"Anticipatory ethnography suggests that the properties of the traditional inputs to design ethnography (situated observations) are analogous with the ‘value adding’ element of design fictions (diegetic prototypes). [...] Assuming that these suppositions are correct, then we can infer that combining the exploratory and temporally independent techniques of design fiction, may allow design ethnography to glimpse the future. Conversely, design ethnography’s established tools for sense making and analysis can be applied to explorations in design fiction. Can anticipatory ethnography lend speculative, the gravitas of hindsight?"

Lindley, J. & Sharma, D. (2014). An Ethnography of the Future. Paper presented at ‘Strangers in Strange Lands’ – An anthropology and science fiction symposium hosted by the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Why do I blog this? These definitions echo with my own research interests. More specifically, a project like Curious Rituals is based on a dual movement : a field research phase that aimed at designing a fictional representation of everyday gestures with digital technologies. To some extent, it is close to the two concepts defined above... and I see design fiction as a sort of "downstream user research" approach to test scenarios about the future... for instance by running focus groups with users and project stakeholders, generating a debate about pieces of technologies by taking concrete instances/scenarios (videos, catalogues, user manuals, etc.).

These definition also reminded me of Laura Forlano's text on Ethnography Matters. Called "Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?", it dealt with similar issues and ended up with this insightful remark:

"As ethnographers, it is not enough to describe social reality, to end a project when the last transcripts and field notes have been analyzed and written up. We must find new ways to engage and collaborate with our subjects (both human and nonhuman). We need better ways of turning our descriptive, analytical accounts into those that are prescriptive, and which have greater import in society and policy. We may do this by inhabiting narratives, generating artifacts to think with and engaging more explicitly with the people formerly known as our “informants” as well as with the public at large."

Probable Possible Preferable Futures

Futures research, foresight and speculative design often use the notion of "possible", "potential", "plausible" and "preferable" future. See for instance the work by Stuart Candy who uses the diagram above based on the work of different researchers. This typology is described in more details in these two articles:

Hancock, T. & Bezold, C. (1994). Possible futures, preferable futures. Healthcare Forum Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, 23–29

Voros, J. (2001). A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios, prospect, the Foresight Bulletin, No 6, Swinburne University of Technology

Why do I blog this? It seems that this graph spread like an internet meme, and it's relevant to get back to how it has been produced, why and how.

"Teacher of algorithms": the IoT equivalent to goldfarmers

"Teacher of Algorithms" by Simone Rebaudengo and commissioned by thingtank.org/ is an highly intriguing project "built with Cardboard and a lot of randomness". It's basically an exploration of algorithm training, how "smart/learning objects" are not finished entities and can evolve by observing contextual data such a people's habits.

Why do I blog this? A fascinating speculative exploration of an important topic; i love the notion of "teach of algorithm" based on the fact that people might be too lazy to train their so-called smart things. It's the "internet of things" equivalent to goldfarmers to some extent. Besides that, the future mundane flavor is great in there.

Design fiction workshop with ESA at Lift15

Last week at Lift 15, I ran a 2-hours workshop with José Achache from the European Space Agency. The idea was to discuss emerging technologies (geopositioning, telecommunications, image capture from satellite) developed by ESA and look at the near future worlds in which they exist: what kind of experiences would come to pass if the world were to be filled with such technologies? What kinds of services may appear? How would they be sold, to whom? What kinds of objects may be designed for everyday use?

With a group of engineers, entrepreneurs and designers, we created a list of service concepts that we described as catalogue items (we re-used here the same template we had for the TBD catalog project). One can see this as a wrap-up of some of the ideas we generated. Each concept is based on a combination of existing technology and we described them as if they were real product sold with a name, a short description, a reference point, and – of course – a price.

In such a small amount of time, it is definitely tricky to produce things like this. Mostly because: participants do not all know each other, we had different "culture" that need time to adjust to one another, it's hard to go from technological potential to service concepting, etc. But overall, the groups did pretty well and some of the ideas we kept seem quite pertinent and plausible I think.

Thank to all the participants (M. Pache, C. Chalas, E. Ndiaye, B. Kerspern, M. Mollon, C. Brand, G. Castrati, E. Hary, P. Tarbouriech, F. Ronse, P. Kiernan, A. Grant, E. Rosenberg, Y. Akhtman, E. Montanari, G. Reboud, N. Huebner, G. Martin de Mercado, D. Tomassini). Thank Constance Delamadeleine for the graphic design help. Plus, thanks José Achache, ESA, the Lift team and Sylvie Reinhard for this opportunity to collaborate.

Digital Creativity on design fictions

For people interested in design fictions, the latest issue of Digital Creativity is a special issue about design fiction. It features papers by people like James Auger or Andrew Morrison, Ragnhild Tronstad and Einar Sneve Martinussen. As proposed by the editor of this issue, Derek Hales, in his introduction entitled "Design fictions an introduction and provisional taxonomy":

"In crafting this issue we were interested in reflecting on design fictions as a methodology and on the ways in which fictional constructs, such as future scenarios and ‘diegetic prototypes’ (D. Kirby 2009), might open design discourse. As much as we might perhaps simplistically suggest that the fictions of non-linear narrative, the achronological and asynchronous, have been central to contemporary media design and to media art, we might also say that the convergence of narrative and technology is central to design fictions: as we will see, design fictions exploit the power of media design to craft and deploy compelling visions of the future. Further than this, though, design fictions have become a significant means through which designers are exploring the ‘present’ condition of interface culture."

Why do I blog this? Gathering material about design fiction for the upcoming Laboratory retreat and for next Friday's workshops in Annecy, France.