Sens-Fiction

In Nantes for Sens-Fiction at Lieu Unique curated by Ramy Fischler and Scott Longfellow.

An exhibit that investigates how fiction influences our conception of future practices; in this laboratory, designers’ methods are informed by the desired outcome. This exhibition also examines what fiction brings to future-use foresight: literary, cinematographic, advertising, and future-focused works, as well as designers’ projects, are placed side by side; they serve to reveal how we live in the world. Ramy Fischler and Scott Longfellow’s multidisciplinary approach led them to invite several personalities to intermingle. Whether they are exploring science fiction, speculative fiction, social-science literature, the relationship between brands and fiction, or speculating about tomorrow’s world through design, these enthusiasts enriched the exploration of the interrelationships between fiction and usage.

Along with Patrick Gyger, Irène Langlet, Daniel Kaplan, Nicolas Minvielle, and Claire Luna, I was part of the curating team. The website also features more material about this project we conduced back in 2020 for another exhibit for Lille World Design Capital.

"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.

The Smithsonian on Science Fiction, the Future and design fiction

The May edition of the Smithsonian has an article on sci-fi, the Future (capital F) and design fiction. Based on interviews with various science-fiction authors (Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Ursula Le Guin, Ted Chiang or Neal Stephenson), this piece by Eileen Gunn highlights how the genre acts as a sort of laboratory and "how the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures."

Interestingly, this article describes classical debates about the mutual relationships between sci-fi, science and technological research: the opposition between utopian and dystopian futures (as well as the acknowledgment that this dualism is flawed), the "where's my flying car?" frustration that some authors want to move away from, the need to embrace new visions of the future, etc. The paper concludes with this sort of summary of the role of science-fiction for society:

Science fiction, at its best, engenders the sort of flexible thinking that not only inspires us, but compels us to consider the myriad potential consequences of our actions. Samuel R. Delany, one of the most wide-ranging and masterful writers in the field, sees it as a countermeasure to the future shock that will become more intense with the passing years. “The variety of worlds science fiction accustoms us to, through imagination, is training for thinking about the actual changes—sometimes catastrophic, often confusing—that the real world funnels at us year after year. It helps us avoid feeling quite so gob-smacked.”

This piece is quite interesting. However, I'm not sure about the current debate on the importance of reading science-fiction in research labs ("Brueckner laments that researchers whose work deals with emerging technologies are often unfamiliar with science fiction.") Of course, I'm convince about Delany's quote above but I'm unsure whether this applies to ANY book, film, video-game or comic-book related with "the Future". Would the Warhammer 40K series of book really help like a JG Ballard novel? Besides, one might also argue that poetry or other forms of literature might be helpful? And why limiting oneself to this? Perhaps there are other ways to get this "flexible thinking" promoted by the authors there: RTS games or Eve-Online situated in a distant future might be relevant too. This problem was recently address in another article in The Atlantic. Robinson Meyer commented on Google's process for selecting Google X projects: "lt must utilize a radical solution that has at least a component that resembles science fiction.", to which the author wrote:

When we imagine a “science fiction”-like future, I think we tend to picture completed worlds, flying cars, the shiny, floating towers of midcentury dreams. We tend, in other words, to imagine future technological systems as readymade, holistic products that people will choose to adopt, rather than as the assembled work of countless different actors, which they’ve always really been. The futurist Scott Smith calls these ‘flat-pack futures,’ and they infect “science fictional” thinking. Science fiction, too, can underestimate the importance and role of social change. For every feminist science fiction writer or Afrofuturist, there is a still better-known member of the genre’s far-right.

Why do I blog this? I'm currently writing a book (French) about these topics, and such articles offer interesting parallel to my current thinking and projects carried out at the Near Future Laboratory.

For people intrigued by such material, these pieces should be read alongside Julian's essay on design fiction, as well as "Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science fiction and Innovation" (Caroline Bassett, Ed Steinmueller, Georgina Voss, Nesta, 2013) and "Imagining Technology" (Jon Turney, Nesta, 2013).

Design fiction: a bibliography

Some resources about design fiction I'm use to share with students. Note that the term itself is polysemic and covers different perceptions about its meaning.

Auger, J. (2011). Alternative Presents and Speculative Futures: Designing fictions through the extrapolation and evasion of product lineages., Negotiating Futures / Design Fictions, Swiss Design Network 2011, Basel.

Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation, Digit. Creat., vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 11--35, 2013.

Bassett, C., Steinmuller, E. & Voss, G. (2013). Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science fiction and Innovation”, Nesta Working Paper 13/07.

Bleecker, J. (2009). Design fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction, Near Future Laboratory, Los Angeles, CA,

Bleecker, (2011). Design Fiction: From Props To Prototypes, Negotiating Futures / Design Fictions, Swiss Design Network 2011, Basel.

Bleecker, J. & Nova, N., (2009). A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing. The Architectural League of New York, New York, NY.

Candy, S. (2010).  The futures of everyday life: politics and the design of experiential scenarios, PhD thesis. The University of Hawai.

DiSalvo, Carl. (2012). Spectacles and Tropes: Speculative Design and Contemporary Food Cultures. The Fibreculture Journal(20).

Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2011). Design noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001.

Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2014). Speculative Everything: design, fiction and social dreaming. MIT Press.

Forlano, L. (2013). Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?, Ethnography Matters.

Franke, B. (2011). Design Fiction is Not Necessarily About the Future, Negotiating Futures / Design Fictions, Swiss Design Network 2011, Basel.

Galloway, A. (2013). Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design, Ethnography Matters.

Grand, S. & Wiedmer, M. (2010). Design Fiction: A Method Toolbox for Design Research in a Complex World, DRS, 2010.

Hales, D. (2013). Design fictions an introduction and provisional taxonomy, Digital Creativity, 24:1, 1-10

Jain, A., Ardern, J. & Pickard, J. (2012). Design Futurescaping, Journal of Futures Studies. 

Johnson, B.D. (2009). “Science Fiction Prototypes Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Future and Love Science Fiction”, in Intelligent Environments 2009 – Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, Callaghan, V., Kameas, A., Reyes, A., Royo, D., Weber, M. (Eds.), IOS Press, Barcelona pp. 3-8.

Johnson, B.D. (2011). “Love and God and Robots: The Science Behind the Science Fiction Prototype “Machinery of Love and Grace””, in Workshop Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Environments Augusto, J. C., Aghajan, V., Callaghan, V., Cook, D. J., O’Donoghue, J., Egerton, S., Gardner, M., Johnson, B. D., Kovalchuk, Y., López-Cózar, R., Mikulecký, P., Ng, J. W. P., Poppe, R., Wang, M. J., Zamudio, V. (Eds.), IOS Press, Nottingham pp. 99-127.

Kirby, D. (2010). The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development. Social Studies of Science 40 (1), pp. 41-70.

Kirby, D., 2011 Lab coats in Hollywood: science, scientists and cinema. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Morrison, A. (2014). Design Prospects: Investigating Design Fiction via a Rogue Urban Drone, In Proceedings of DRS 2014 Conference. Umeå, Sweden.: 16.06.2014–19.06.2014

Raford, Noah. (2012). From Design to Experiential Futures, The Future of Futures: The Association of Professional Futurists.

Shedroff N. & Noessel C. (2012). Make It So Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. San Francisco: Rosenfeld.

Sterling, B. (2009), Design Fiction, Interactions 16 (3), pp. 20-24.

Ward, M. (2013). Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice Towards a fictionally biased design education, Medium. 

Zeller, L. (2011) What You See Is What You Don’t Get: Addressing Implications of Information Technology through Design Fiction” Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6770  pp. 329-336.

ETHICAL AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

ETHICAL AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES by Matthieu Cherubini is a stunning project I ran across tonight:

"Many car manufacturers are projecting that by 2025 most cars will operate on driveless systems. While it is valid to think that our roads will be safer as autonomous vehicles replace traditional cars, the unpredictability of real-life situations that involve the complexities of moral and ethical reasoning complicate this assumption.

How can such systems be designed to accommodate the complicatedness of ethical and moral reasoning? Just like choosing the color of a car, ethics can become a commodified feature in autonomous vehicles that one can buy, change, and repurchase, depending on personal taste.

Three distinct algorithms have been created - each adhering to a specific ethical principle/behaviour set-up - and embedded into driverless virtual cars that are operating in a simulated environment, where they will be confronted with ethical dilemmas."

Why do I blog this? This definitely counts as a project related to my interest towards algorithms and how their use influence everyday life.