design fiction helsinki

Design Fiction

001

Design seems to be everywhere these days. Anything that was something can have design appended to it — service, business, experience, industry, circuit, finance, research. It’s a word with the power to shape and inform the things I am doing these days. Things and moments I observe seem to always get a bit of mental critique, often with an awkward but earnest deployment of design idioms and the higher-order languages used to express the handiwork of design practices. Objects and even purposefully created experiences become conclusions to the handcrafted work that goes into the materialization of someone’s — a designer’s — thoughts and ideas. Thinking about design as just this — the materialization of ideas, or principles expressed and embodied within objects — creates, for me, an entirely new approach to making things, particularly in the way it allows for a more formal approach to creating different kinds of near future worlds. The “principles” upon which a creative materialization can be based need not be the same, tired principles of manufacturability, commodification, and margin. Rather, as at least a way to explore, innovate, probe and provoke, design can materialize forms that “speak on” other, perhaps less rusty principles.

Design can be thought of as a kind of creative, imaginative authoring practice — a way of describing and materializing the imagination. It can connect ideas to their expression as objects (made, constituted, machined, instantiated, materialized). These are material objects that have a form, certainly. But they become real before themselves, because they could never exist outside of an imagined use context, however mundane or vernacular that imagined context of social practices might be. Designed objects tell stories, even by themselves. Design can make props to help speculate and imagine, even without words. These objects are like conversation pieces, things around which discussions happen and that help us to imagine other kinds of worlds and experiences.

Designed objects are concatenations of material, color, form, surfaces — all the good disciplined design language idioms, technical terms and concerns. But they are always an assemblage of possibilities for a different kind of near future world, if even only one small, specialized corner of that world. These worlds are “worlds” not because they contain everything, but because they contain enough to encourage our imaginations, which, as it turns out, are much better at filling out the questions, activities, logics, culture, interactions and practices of the imaginary worlds in which such a designed object might exist. Such a design practice creates these conversation pieces, with the conversations being stories about the kinds of practices and experiences that might surround the designed object. Design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, with a story to tell.

What are these stories? They are nothing particularly formal, just other ways to express what you’re thinking, perhaps before you’ve even figured everything out. Language is a tricky thing, often lacking the precision you’d like, which is why conversation pieces designed to provoke the imagination, open a discussion up to explore possibilities and provoke new considerations. Heady stuff, but even in the simplest, vernacular contexts, such stories are starting points for creative exploration.

Design is the materialization of ideas shaped by design principles that tell you “how” to go about materializing an idea, like guiding principles that end up as specifications of a more interpretive, elastic sort. Not engineering specifications, or the typical list of contents one finds in most any designed object — especially gadgets, like the flavors of WiFi, types of USB, quantities of gigabytes, inches of diagonality, etc. Principles are like the embedded DNA of a design, but can be as much a DNA about experiences to be had as instrumental measurements and adherence to manufacturing codes and trade badges.

[[[ SIDE BAR — doctor a product box with new kinds of specifications on its box side ]]]

Design fiction is a way of exploring different approaches to making things, probing the conclusions to your imagination, removing the usual constraints when designing for massive market commercialization — the ones that people in blue shirts and yellow ties call “realistic.” This is a different genre of design. Not realism, but one with that is forward looking, beyond incremental and makes an effort to explore new interaction rituals. As much as science fact tells you what is and is not possible, design fiction understands constraints differently. Design fiction is about creative provocation, raising questions, innovation.

I play in a studio that’s really exceptional, with incredibly creative designers whose have excellent listening skills and do not start with assumptions that are euphemisms for constraints and boundaries and limits. I’m not just saying that. It’s true. Our studio doesn’t design product, if such is taken to mean the product of manufacturing plants, rather than the product of active, thoughtful imaginations. But we do design provocations that confront the assumptions about products, broadly. Our provocations are objects meant to produce new ways of thinking about the near future, optimistic futures, and critical, questioning perspectives. We clarify and translate strategic vectors, using design to investigate the many imaginable near futures. It’s a way of enhancing the corporate imagination, swerving conversations to new possibilities that are reasonable but often hidden in the gluttony of overburdened markets of sameness.

Design fiction is a mix of science fact, design and science fiction. It is a kind of authoring practice that recombines the traditions of writing and story telling with the material crafting of objects. Through this combination, design fiction creates social objects that tell stories — things that participate in the creative process by encouraging the human imagination. The conclusion to the designed fiction are stories that are speculations about new, different, distinctive social practices that assemble around these objects. Design fictions help tell stories that provoke and raise questions. Like props that help focus the imagination and speculate about possible near future worlds — whether profound change or simple even mundane social practices.

Design fiction does all of the unique things that science-fiction can do as a reflective, written story telling, creating imaginative conversations about possible future worlds. Like some forms of science fiction, it speculates about a near future tomorrow, extrapolating from today. In the speculation, design fiction casts a critical eye on current object forms and the interaction rituals they allow and disallow. The extrapolations allow the speculation without the usual constraints introduced when “hard decisions” are made by the program manager whose concerns introduce the least-comon denominator specifications that eliminate creative innovation. Design fiction is the cousin of science fiction in that it is more concerned about multiple potential futures, and those futures that are for reflection.

Design fiction works in the space between the arrogance of science fact, and the seriously playful imaginary of science fiction, making things that are both real and fake, but aware of the irony of the muddle — even claiming it as an advantage. It’s a design practice, first of all — because it makes no authority claims on the world, has no special stake in canonical truth; because it can work comfortably with the vernacular and pragmatic; because it has as part of its vocabulary the word “people” (not “users”) and all that implies; because it can operate with wit and paradox and a critical stance. It assumes nothing about the future, except that there can be simultaneous futures, and multiple futures, and simultaneous-multiple futures — even an end to everything.

In this way design fiction is a hybrid, hands-on practice that operates in a murky middle ground between ideas and their materialization, and between science fact and science fiction. It is a way of probing, sketching and exploring ideas. Through this practice, one bridges imagination and materialization by modeling, crafting things, telling stories through objects, which are now effectively conversation pieces in a very real sense. A bit like making science fact prototypes, or props for a science fiction film, but not quite. We’ll get to the “how” later.

When I think of design this way, it feels like it should be understood slightly differently from the all-encompassing “design”, which is why I am referring to it as “design fiction.”

002

So..what?

This is a short essay about the relationship between design, science fiction and the material elements that help tell stories about the future — mostly props and special effects as used in film and other forms of visual stories. It’s a first stab at describing some thinking that arose while reading an essay that a colleague and friend co-wrote on the relationship between science fiction and a field of computer science called ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp” for short. The essay by Paul Dourish from the University of California, Irvine, and Genevieve Bell from Intel’s People and Practices research group is called “Resistance is futile:…” In it is an exploration of the relationship between ubicomp principles on the one hand, and, on the other, some of the plot principles and the general milieu from science fiction television shows of the 70s and 80s.

Their essay is meant to provide insights into ubicomp itself, as a field of of endeavor pioneered by incredibly smart people who grew up with a particular vision of a future, computationally rich world. By revealing some intriguing similarities in terms of of the overlapping hopes, dreams and concerns found within the science fiction stories and, implicitly within ubicomp’s founding principles, the essay weaves together these two “genres” of science work — science fact and science fiction. Through the reading, one gets the sense, if you haven’t already had an inkling, that fiction and fact are really quite intertwined, the one shaping and informing the other in a productive way. And, going further, if such an inkling is to be had, why should one genre of science merely inform the other? Doesn’t this essay suggest that one may in fact “do” science fiction, not necessarily as a crafter of stories in book form, as most science fiction practitioners do — we call them writers — but as a reformed science fact, as an evolved engineer-designer hybrid seeking a different approach to innovation, whose work starts from the science-fiction anchorage rather than from the conservative rationality that undergirds most science fact work?

This perspective goes further than the one offered in the essay. Bell and Dourish are careful to avoid suggesting that the genres are interchangeable in the way my reflections considered. They do nothing to suggest that ubicomp is a kind of science fiction. What they do, and its a pretty gutsy bit of work, is put the one alongside the other to reflect on the contrasts and similarities. This by itself is a remarkable step to take, especially considering the audience is that of a proper science fact journal where such a style of literary scholarship — “reading” the two science genres together — is more likely found in the humanities than in computer science and engineering. Juxtaposing in any fashion the “real” work of science fact with the “imaginary” world of science fiction — well, you just don’t do that. It’s not “real” work. It’s not the same as running a study or building a new data encryption algorithm. Those things are “real” work. From a conservative, pragmatic engineering perspective in which one would never, ever put fact alongside of fiction and expect anything better than ridicule and a nasty peer review.

In their essay, Dourish and Bell caution that they do not mean to suggest “..that [ubiquitous computing and science fiction] are equivalent or interchangeable; we want to read ubiquitous computing alongside science fiction, not to read ubiquitous computing as science fiction.” Perhaps they make this move because they really believe this, or perhaps because they want to avoid ridicule and nasty peer review notes. Nevertheless, or perhaps because many good things have come from a bit of formative ridicule, I became intrigued by the knots of society, technology, politics, our future imaginary suggested in their essay. These knots, from a slightly sideways glance, create larger interconnected assemblages that are more than a curious reflection on how science fiction relates to ubicomp. Rather, just at the periphery of their insights I saw possibility that serious, hands-on work could employ science fiction as a design framework. Like writing and telling stories with design objects, their user scenarios become plot points, filing out richer narratives about people (not users.)

In this case, it foregrounded to me the ways that science fact and science fiction are the same, simultaneous activity, both ways of materializing ideas. When I was asked to write a response to go alongside of the essay’s publication, I had the chance to think about ubicomp and science fiction and, from there, broader questions arose.

The questions that arose are these: How can design participate in shaping possible near future worlds? How can the integration of story telling, technology, art and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future? How does the material act of making shape how we think about what is possible and how we think about what should be possible? I came to a rough, still murky conclusion that there was a practice there, just at the contours of their essay that may as well be called “Design Fiction.”

003

As a principle, the science of facts and the science of fictions have their own distinctive characteristics which helps draw hard boundaries between the one and the other. But, in practice (which is what really matters when things are made), these are two human endeavors that are quite tangled up. The knots that blur the boundaries between and bind together these two science idioms are the practice of design fiction. Design fiction happens when you tie together fact and fiction and play comfortably and happily in the between. The inside between is where this idea of design fiction comes up. It’s the tension that arises from being in a bit of a muddle, neither firmly staking yourself on the side of fact, nor on the side of fiction. But, quite literally, taking a bit from each anchorage — from both the sciences — to create something that can enjoy the possibilities of speculation about new experiences rather than the constraints of least-common denominator assumptions that are specifications for commodity scrap heaps.

In this one small instance I am proposing that this knotting action become a deliberate, conscientious, named part of the design practice, rather than as something to be avoided or hidden after things are done. Revel in the messiness, the speculation, and the imbroglio that arises when you don’t play by the old rules of the rational, modern world. Create the “action” of speculation and fiction-making in between as part of the design practice — play up the tension and provoke its circulation. Throw out the silly sober “proprietary processes” that every design/creative/engineering agency that ultimately lead to the same old conclusions anyway. Look for innovation by playing against conservative rules that shape now bankrupt commodity markets of uninspired, throw-away designs.

[[[ SIDE BAR, R.D.’s SPECULATIVE DESIGN ]]]

The unusual, unexpected futures are especially in need of a more active voice, especially if they can stake out a broader possible terrain within which are other possible futures. If only to create an alternative to the programmed myth that there is only one future on a flat graph that goes up and to the right — or that there is only one future not evenly distributed.

[[[ GRAPHS OF FUTURES ]]] [[[ UP and to the RIGHT, against UP and PRECIPITOUS CLIFF..says as much about what the future is as anything — that it is a space of hope, mostly, and aspiration, not a given ]]]

Rather than concerning ourselves only with the conclusions of design fiction, lets look where it happens, in the entanglements before things are worked out and given a gloss. Before the end is the messy middle bits, when things seem as though they’ll never get finished. The conclusion — the finish — almost always hides the struggle for completion. The end results of evolving an idea into a material form are only the final punctuation to a longer muddle in which ideas and their object proxies struggle to express themselves against other inconsonant ideas and object proxies. It’s very much something one might call “political” the way a design — the knot of all the work that goes into making the thing — achieves its conclusion. With design fiction, you begin to find lots of bastard ideas; lots of “memes” with rather muddled origin stories.

Where do you look for the practice, the actual struggle that reveals the more interesting activity of humans willing a future into existence? It all happens where ideas swap properties, becoming in their way the material thing. A mess is made of previously well-disciplined, coherent categories of ideas.

Tracing the knots illuminates certain aspects of a design fiction exercise. You notice an idea from science fiction cohere as science fact, or a speculation that would be difficult to categorize as science fact has found its way into a bit of near future science fiction that then becomes more widely circulated than if it had remained an utterance within an obscure professional science society journal.

[[[ SIDEBAR ]]]

[[HITLab Neuromancer thing; books on the wall at Nokia House]]

While a restless graduate student at the University of Washington I worked at a place called the Human Interface Technology Lab, or HITLab. The lab was working quite hard on virtual reality (VR), another (again) of a kind of immersive, 3D environment that, today, one might experience as something like Second Life. The technology had a basic instrumental archetype canonized in a pair of $250,000 machines (one for each eyeball) called, appropriately, the RealityEngine. With video head mount that looked like a scuba-mask, one could experience a kind of digital virtual world environment that was exciting for what it suggested for the future, but very rough and sparse in its execution. As I was new to the new HITLab (still in temporary trailers on a muddly slope by the campus’ steam plant), I went through the informal socialization rituals of acquainting myself to the other members of the team — and to the idioms by which the lab shared its collective imaginary about what exactly was going on here, and what was VR. Anything that touches the word “reality” needs some pretty fleet-footed references to help describe what’s going on, and a good set of anchor points so one can do the indexical language trick of “it’s like that thing in..” For the HITLab, the closest we got to a shared technical manual was William Gibson’s”Neuromancer” which I was encouraged to read closely before I got too far involved and risked the chance of being left out of the conversations that equated what we were making with Gibson’s “Cyberspace Deck”, amongst other science fiction props. I mean — that’s what we said. There was no irony. It was the reference point. I’m serious. I mean..this is from a paper that Randy Walser from Autodesk wrote at this same time, when VR was going to fix everything:

In William Gibson’s stories starting with Neuromancer, people use an instrument called a “deck” to “jack” into cyberspace. The instrument that Gibson describes is small enough to fit in a drawer, and directly stimulates the human nervous system. While Gibson’s vision is beyond the reach of today’s technology, it is nonetheless possible, today, to achieve many of the effects to which Gibson alludes. A number of companies and organizations are actively developing the essential elements of a cyberspace deck (though not everyone has adopted the term “deck”). These groups include NASA, University of North Carolina, University of Washington, Artificial Reality Corp., VPL Research, and Autodesk, along with numerous others who are starting new R&D programs.

(PDF: http://tr.im/zoj)

Shortly after the HITLab, a number of us formed a company called World Design where we meant to continue our speculations about what “virtual worlds” technology could do in a commercial context. There’s a larger story there, perhaps but the intriguing side note was our corporate bard, an informal ally from the neighborhood of ideas who also lived nearby in Seattle, Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author of Snowcrash. Stephenson’s science fiction, like that of Rucker, Gibson’s and Sterling’s, our other cyberpunk heros, were as much design and stye manuals as they were entertaining literature.

Except for the overdose of hubris — which you just have to take with every bit of new technoscience that’s trying to sell its near future self — there’s nothing wrong with this discursive slip-and-slide that entangles science fact and science fiction. It’s all good stuff. It’s part of the practice of design fiction. The knitting together of fiction and reality, ideas and their materialization happens because of the powerful language objects found in the science fiction. Just as quickly, the “reality” circulates back into the science fiction.

Each kind of science provides for the other the indices and anchor points necessary to tell the story of this near future vision of VR, which real companies with mostly real funding sources were cobbling together. The objects that authors like William Gibson craft through words are kinds of designed objects that help fill out the vision, inciting conversations, providing backdrops, set pieces and props. The Cyberspace Deck. Gibson wrote about it and it had a story that was compelling enough that it may as well be built. The written objects creates a goal line, a critical path toward the successful completion of the VR mythos. Together, the linkages that connect fact and fiction are ways of filling in that shared imaginary, which then knits the social formations of everyone and everything together.

Bruno Latour would remind us that this is the socialization of objects. Technology is precisely the socialization of ideas, nothing more. You don’t need to look much further than this VR anecdote to appreciate how technology is always already the assemblage of social practices. It happens in the circulation of ideas and stories that draw in a multitude of perspectives, and ways of expressing the imagination, from circuit diagrams to galactic adventures. (Where things go south is when there are not a diversity of perspectives. When, for example, the principles and logics of engineering or business stake out rather constrained boundaries, with talk about reason, practicality, impossibilities, sales projections, risk mitigation, and talk about what is possible by the end of the next fiscal quarter. Such things are chloroform to innovation.)

[[ END SIDEBAR ]]]

Design fiction is somewhere in the space between the science of fact and the science of fiction, which is where the science work all happens anyway. The fact and fiction are extremes — these are really not much more than far-away anchor points where no one really works. We’re always only ever in between. There is no fact without also spending some time speculating in a fictional mode, asking the “what if..?” questions. Any good science fiction practitioner will spend time with those who consider themselves to be working in the science fact idiom, and everyone’s happy to learn from each other, activating their imaginations in ways that are reflected in the film, or book or as scribbles on the white board or cobbled together “prototypes” on the lab bench. Science fact and science fiction are there as way points and references that people can claim to help them describe to others what they do. Science fact and science fiction provide a list of characteristic properties that simplify the problem of organizing and categorizing specific well-bounded kinds of cultural production.

People who claim science fact as the practice idiom in which they do their work would never really say they do not imagine things beyond “fact.” Certainly they enter into a sort of science fiction, which they might describe as speculating and “brainstorming.” It is a science fiction that is made legitimate by calling its result hypotheticals, or by explaining these speculations as “theoretical prototypes”, or “just ideas” as if to say, “I know this is silly and not really possible, nevertheless..” These are explanations that are like alarms indicating that we’ve hit up against the hard, well-policed border between the proper work of science fact and the murky terrain of science fiction. All efforts forward of the aspirational scientist-industrialist will work at bringing the fiction into the world of hard, manufacturable facts.

In the same way, most any science fiction author would never say they do not allow the influence of science fact to enter into their imagination, shaping and informing the stories they write. In fact, science fiction has a genre identifier for their “hypothetical” — hard science fiction, where “hard” refers to rigor, the hard-set of scientific principles to support the accuracy of any science content within the story. Claiming some of the properties from the other end of the spectrum is swapping properties. The science happens in between the fact and the fiction, between the extremities. Across the boundaries set up to partition disciplines, sharing and borrowing and swapping properties from fact and fiction, intermingling and always in noisy conversation.

We can say that the idea that science fact and science fiction intermingle is not something terribly new, although it can be a discomforting idea. After all, facts are facts and fiction — well, that’s something you concern yourself with to unwind after the hard work of, say, detecting elusive elementary particles with multi-billion dollar data filters and data collectors called super colliders. But, really — any science is always a bit of speculation, hope, imagination and self-assured declarations. It is as if science fiction is the imagination and science fact is the conclusion to this imagining, where good ideas go to become material things.

[[[ SIDE BAR ]]]

It can be quite difficult to operate out in the open between science fact and science fiction. If you’re going to do science of some sort, you usually have to chose a side, chose what set of properties and commitments you’re going to claim. Which one of the hypothetical category anchors will you chose.

IMAGE FROM MY STAR TREK CONVENTION PROGRAM ST:TOS Blueprints, Technical Manual, etc.

[[Because I was a young fan of Star Trek as a kid, somehow I ended up wanting to create some aspects of that imaginary world and insert it into my daily existence. I’m not going to say that I wanted to go so far as to literally recreate all material aspects of that fiction, but there were possibilities there that shaped my imagination and, because it’s a human fundamental, I wanted to “articulate” that imaginary through more material than my imagination could project. I may have ended up telling science fiction stories but I became an engineer, perhaps because that got me closer to computers at a time when they were still quite expensive and opaque — they were still near future fiction in many ways. My stake was claimed toward the science fact anchorage. Over time I came to realize that there was less than ample imaginary possibilities there. Speculation was quite constrained; it was nothing like thinking of peculiar ideas and then materializing them. It owed too much to rationality and capitalism to dabble and toy around; a sad state of affairs, indeed. Even spaces like universities that one might think were based on principles of exploration and unconstrained possibility were rather hemmed in, expressing innovation in quite mundane terms. So, I began to slip toward this other anchorage..]]

[[[ END SIDE BAR ]]]

It so happens that I can’t help but dig deeper into this interrelationship between science fact and science fiction. It’s part of a larger project to understand how culture circulates, especially the formation of ideas, knowledge and their object proxies. Which ideas get to circulate and why? How do ideas obtain their “mass” and accumulate attention and conversation or become sidelined and obsolete The larger project is especially about understanding the mechanisms by which material and ideas swap properties, which I think is why I am drawn to exploring design as a practice.

At this point, for this topic of design fiction, I’m inclined to a bit more analysis, perhaps because I’m intrigued by the muddle of anything hybrid, which I see in this undisciplinary mix of design, science, fact and fiction. The longer bit of this essay is an exploration of the ways that science fact and science fiction get all tangled up, creating a knot of knowledge and its circulation through larger meaning-making assemblages. It’s an exploration of how the science of fact and the science of fiction blur together in practice, always. Rather than focusing on this in a pedantic way, I am doing it to better understand how undisciplined property swapping amongst science fact and science fiction can yield an exciting form of design work that involves thinking, crafting, speculating and imagining.

I am going to start with one simple but rich example of this property swapping. The example is meant to show a bit of design fiction in action through the film Minority Report. Two things are drawn out in this example. The first is the strength of a good story in contributing to the design fiction process. Objects themselves, which never are devoid of context even if it is something we only imagine and place around the object to give it meaning. A particularly rich context, a good story that involves people and their social practices rather than fetishizing the object and its imagined possibilities — this is what design fiction aspires to. And in the film Minority Report, I find that this is done particularly well, the way the “gadgets” in the P.K. Dick / Spielberg future of 2054 are not fetishized as things in themselves. Rather, they become instruments of human fallibility and hubris. They are not perfect as one might see in an advertising fiction, meant to play to ones gullibility and expectations of increasing utility and perfection as if, in the new toy from industry, all the problems will finally be worked through.

004

[[[ DESIGN FICTION, FACT AND FICTION SWAP PROPERTIES & MINORITY REPORT ]]] [[[ PART ONE of ONE ]]] There’s a scene in the film “Minority Report”, which also happens to be a wonderful prototype of a ubiquitous computing future, in which Tom Cruise’s character Inspector John Anderton manipulates a database of sound and images that are from the near future. In this scene, which just about everyone in the world knows about, Cruise’s character makes orchestra conductor-like gestures, summoning and juxtaposing fuzzy snippets of what has yet to almost happen in a mad-dash effort to piece together a puzzle. The puzzle, for those who do not know the film is, of course, unlocking the mystery of a murder we know will take place, unless the clues of its location and perpetrator are discovered with only minutes to spare.

(Unfortunately, there is no easy way to share this segment of the film, which I show when I present this material as a lecture. If you have the film, pop it in now and just watch until around time code mark 4:22.)

The example I bring up here is, of course, the gesture interface that Anderton uses to piece together the clue fragments for the future murder he is investigating. As a film element, it has a well-balanced mix of visual dynamics to keep a science fiction film audience riveted, following the movement closely to develop an understanding of precisely what is going on — what is being manipulated and how bits of clue are juxtaposed and re-arranged as one might do so with a puzzle. Special attention is placed on the precision of the gestures that Anderton uses in order to manipulate the fragments of video and sound — zooming in on a bit of imagery with hand-over-hand gesture; deleting a few things by moving them with a forceful and dismissive sweep into this interface’s version of today’s user interface trash can.

This sequence, which begins at the very start of the film and continues until 4:22, presents a compelling extrapolation into a near future world. It does much more than demonstrate some bit of technology, relying less on the object and more on its place in the world of human social life. The sequence tells a story, helping to move us from today into the year 2054. The extrapolation from today into 2054 happens in just under five minutes, and it does not fetishize the device, or the technology. Rather, more convincingly, we are led through a bit of convincing human drama, something particularly timeless.

There’s more than the clue-construction device that Anderton uses — whatever its called. It would be a simple matter to show a few still images from this sequence as an index to the small bit of argument I’m presenting. But, it is precisely this bit of story that I want to highlight, and not just the instrument. Not the story itself — the pre-murder. Rather, its what the story is able to do to fill out the meaning of the clue-construction device. It’s not a gestural interface machine. It’s a device used to edit sound and images somehow extracted from the future. It’s as if the story is sharing with the audience, who may be reasonably wondering — how do you edit and manipulate fragments of sound and images from the future? How does police evidence gathering work in the year 2054, when evidence is things that have not yet happened — but will? Do they travel into the future through some device and collect things that they bring back? Do detectives still use little baggies and tweezers to collect scraps of bone fragment, sending them to clever forensic scientists back at the lab?

No, of course not. Or not in this possible future. In the speculative near-future Department of Precrime, evidence is a story, pieced together through these extracted fragments from the near future.

Whereas “design” might typically highlight the object itself, outside of its dramatic context — perhaps the special interface gloves and screen floating in 3D CAD space — by introducing the drama of this moment I mean to reveal the advantages of attaching “fiction” to the design, filling the object with a meaning and a context that it would never really have sitting by itself on a silk pillow, demonstrating its vague, latent power. Put it in a story, move it to the background as if it were mundane and quite ordinary — because it is, or would be. The attention is on the people and their dramatic tension, as it should be. Perhaps 4:22 is a bit long — I don’t think so. It allows the design fiction to tell a story that is broader than the instrument itself. This is what design fiction is about. We don’t fetishize the instrument; rather emphasize the rituals that obtain between humans and non-humans and the interactions therein.

But don’t we want to know what this thing is in the context of a story in which people — people in the year 2054 — routinely (lets assume so) operate machines to do their work using gestures such as this. Were we to show the instrument itself, it would be meaningless if there were no story to surround it. This is a bit like the product design presentations that show the object sitting on a silk pillow, or featureless grey CAD backdrop, as if people use their blenders and motorcycles in featureless grey 3D landscape.

So we have to ask, what is it about this sequence that should be highlighted? Is it just the gestural interface? Not exactly. If that were the only matter that concerned us, showing stills might suffice rather than watching over four minutes of film. Stills by themselves would remove the dramatic context. We’d have to fill in some gaps, explaining what this guy is doing, perhaps by gesturing ourselves, or using descriptions such as “its like..” and then adding in the story ourselves, explaining that he is doing a future form of detective work, manipulating this images from the future. And the questions would be raised, such as — “Images and sound from the future? What’re you talking about? How do you get images and sound from the future?”.. “Well, there are these evolved humans, they’re sort of these technical devices floating in a kind of nutrient rich slurry, and they can see into moments of the future where [deadly? murder?] crime occurs and then send those images from their mind into the apparatus that use manipulate using gestures”.. “C’mon..I don’t get it..” And so on.

Finally it becomes apparent that its just easier to show a broad sequence. And then it becomes apparent that the capability to tell stories — even visual stories — about what you’re imagining offers a richer way of materializing these ideas, and circulating them. Providing a broader context by moving the instrument into the background, and bringing people and their stories into the foreground provides a more effective, compelling fiction.

There’s a layer beneath this bit of design fiction — the visual story by Steven Spielberg based on a narrative story by P.K. Dick extrapolates and “designs” a future fictional world framed by speculative technological instrumentalities. The layer beneath is the intractable knot of fact and fiction and this activity of swapping properties that knits the one to the other. The design fiction is a kind of midway conclusion to the activity. Midway because it is always almost the result. But in practice, the design fiction is only a way point toward an elusive, always proximate future.

I tell you about this moment in the film not because I want to discuss the story per se. What I want to do is explore a puzzle of my own. I want to unknot a small tangle of activity that is precisely a bit of property swapping in which the science of the film swaps back and forth between fact and fiction. Science fact and science fiction jump through each other’s hoops. We move from the activities of scientists in their labs to their conversations with film directors and props makers and special effects artisans working in their shops and film production software. What I want to do is follow just a small bit of this tangle of conversations and objects and ideas between Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” through to the Steven Spielberg production of a film based on the story. Following just a few of these linkages shows how easily science-fact and science-fiction swap ideas, properties and objects.

[[[ SWAPPING PROPERTIES ]]]

Science-fact and science-fiction are entangled in the Minority Report drama, which isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it should happen more. Science-fiction has way more imagination than science-fact and almost certainly circulates knowledge and ideas more effectively than all the science journals and science journalism in the world.

In the production of Minority Report, the idea for such a gestural interface came from somewhere and, in this case, the film’s technical consultant, John Underkoffler. Underkoffler was a member of the Tangible Media Group at M.I.T., and had participated along with a panel of luminaries in providing some speculations as to what the future of Minority Report might be experienced based on their insights and their extrapolations of the current trends in the technology world.[http://tr.im/2ozc] What was needed were some projections to help trace a vector from the present to the future of 2054, when the film takes place.

From a project at the Tangible Media Group called “The Luminous Room” were a number of “immersive” computing concepts, drawn from some of the principles of ubiquitous computing. The principles are related to the idea that computers might become more directly integrated into the architecture of the environments that people occupy. Rather than manipulating them with a keyboard and mouse, people might use gestures for direct input.

Translating laboratory principles into a dramatic film allows for the lab ideas to circulate in a bold fashion, beyond what would be accepted in the typical, conservative academic-industrial context. There is a larger military-industrial-light and magic complex in effect here, which is precisely the larger, messy tangle through which fact and fiction become indistinguishable. The action is a kind of science fact-fiction work that effectively tries out some ideas within the film’s narrative. It’s a kind of prototyping — sketching out possibilities by building things, wrapping them around a story and letting them play out as they might.

More formally, this is what David A. Kirby calls the “diegetic prototype.” It’s a kind of technoscientific prototyping activity knotted to science fiction film production that emphasizes the circulation of knowledge and ideas. It is like a concept prototype, only with the added design fiction property of a story into which it can play its part, enlivening the narrative. The diegetic prototype refers to the way that a science fiction film provides an opportunity for a technical consultant to speculate within the fictional reality of the film, considering their work as more than a props maker or effects artist creating appearances. The diegetic prototype inserts itself into the film’s drama — the diegesis. The film drama activates the designed object, making it a necessary component of the story. The film itself becomes an opportunity to explore an idea, share it publicly and realize it, at least in part and with the consistency necessary for film production rather than laboratory production.

“..scientists and engineers can also create realistic filmic images of “technological possibilities” with the intention of reducing anxiety and stimulating desire in audiences to see potential technologies become realities. For scientists and engineers, the best way to jump start technical development is to produce a working prototype. Working prototypes, however, are time consuming, expensive and require initial funds. I argue in this essay that for technical advisors cinematic depictions of future technologies are actually “diegetic prototypes” that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence, and viability. Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage even over true prototypes: in the diegesis these technologies exist as “real” objects that function properly and which people actually use.” [Kirby, TBP, p. 4]

Kirby describes Underkoffler’s role as a technical consultant where he “..treats his diegetic prototypes as if he were designing not only physical prototypes but real world objects that are a part of “everyday life” in the diegesis [of the film.]” [Kirby, TBP, p. 7]

In the particular case of “Minority Report”, Underkoffler participated in a three-day pre-production conference convened by Spielberg, in which the director brought together smart, forward thinking people to speculate about life in the year 2054. Underkoffler saw this as an opportunity to channel technical knowledge in a new way, using film as a way to articulate his imagination. That is, swapping the laboratory production for film production.

The film becomes an opportunity to create a vision of the future but, perhaps more important, to share that vision to a large public audience. In specific cases, such as the evocative “gesture interface” concepts Underkoffler introduced into the film’s story and its production design, ideas gather a kind of mass. They become culturally legible. We “get” the idea of using conductor-like gestures to interact with our information technology. It takes more than a scientist demonstrating this idea in a laboratory. It needs a broader, sensible context — such as one that great storytellers and great filmmakers can put together into a popular film, with an engaging narrative.

The follow-on to this introduction of gesture interfaces to a large public audience are more gesture interfaces, each one staking out Minority Report as a point of conception, either explicitly or implicitly. It’s as if Minority Report serves as the conditions of possibility for more and further explorations of the possibility for gesture interaction — whether touch-based gestures, as in the iPhone and other techniques, or free-space and tracking gesture interactions.

The entanglement between science fact and science fiction is perhaps best summarized in the canonical un-tangler, Google. Searching across Google’s database for “minority report interface” reveals most plainly the property swapping gymnastics of this bit of science-fact-science-fiction. We see here stills from the film contiguous with things that look like middling science projects, to demonstrations at trade shows of touch panels, to reviews of the iPhone interface using “Minority Report” as a point of reference, to promises that the “Minority Report” interface is just around the corner (wherever that may be.) It goes on and on, and through it all, just a step back from the specific “results” is what I mean by the entanglements where science fact and science fiction swap properties.

[[[ IMAGE GOOGLE MINORITY REPORT INTERFACE ]]]

[[[ 2002 Minority Report Film [[[ 2005 CNN News Night [[[ 2006 Jeff Hahn at TED [[[ 2007 SIGGRAPH [[[ 2008 CEBIT

This isn’t to say that Minority Report serves as the canonical origin story for gesture interaction, but it certainly is a powerful, gravity-like force providing a reference point through which science fact and science fiction swap properties and become partners in their own exploration of possible futures. The film is what gives some sense to a curious speculation about people flapping their arms around to interact with computers. In fact, it makes enough sense for the idea to spread outward, beyond the film itself into other experiments, and (inevitably) commercial endeavors. The Nintendo Wii comes to mind, but there are others, depending on which communities and networks of ideas one circulates amongst. It even becomes one of those rare speculations that can gain some time on a national news broadcast. So long as it can provide an anchor for an audience to this popular film, it becomes “legible” as an opportunity for a bit of light news. It is this example as seen in a short bit of CNN news candy that perhaps speaks most directly to the intriguing possibilities of the design fiction principle of creating inextricable tangles between fact and fiction.

Over a few years we see a variety of variations on a theme, which is not to say that Minority Report started it all in any kind of essential, definitive way. Rather, what is intriguing is to consider the ways in which ideas and their materialization and their circulation back to the world of re-considered ideas rely on larger cultural imaginaries to provide necessary contexts and meanings. We need our metaphors — they provide anchors for thought and reflection and motivation for creating new things. Design fiction is a way to work on and refine these object-ideas, particularly as we consider them to be important transition points towards new, more habitable kinds social worlds.

Remember, this is a kind of knowledge-making work. There is good, fun work that goes into considering how such a gesture interface might work. For the filmmakers who are more attentive to the story, what the design-fiction production team cobbles together is valuable to the extent that it helps move the story along without drawing too much attention to itself. (In a minimal case their work may even perform the role of the “MacGuffin” famously deployed by Hitchcock in a sense and need not have the same depth of possibility and consideration that the Minority Report interface device has. It need only be there, as an element that moves a story forward with no need for extensive, fleshed-out details of operation or pre-production design. It could, in fact, be the vaguely specified but full-of-meaning device often used in such technothrillers and usually just called — “the device.”)

Minority Report reveals the way that science fiction is shaped and informed by science fact, and science fact shaped and informed by the science fiction. Practitioners who stake a claim along either side of the sciences come together to participate in the action of turning ideas into material, in this case through a high-budget film production. It just might just as well happen within other contexts — other frameworks for the production and circulation of ideas, things other than a high-budget film with fancy tools, toys and creative talent.

But, it just as well may happen “from” the other side of the imaginary fact-fiction continuum. The initial impulses of the “production” of ideas and circulation of material may very well be biased toward the creation of the more fact-based kind of science — the kind that may enjoy a good science fiction film but take that as entertainment more than a reference to anything real and possible to create in the laboratory.

In this case, with the bias on doing “real” science — no one’s really being fooled into thinking that things like gesture interfaces of the sort one sees in Minority Report are something you can get and play with in your living room. Except — yes, you can. The design fiction of the film probed the possibility spaces of this new, curious kind of interaction ritual, activating further consideration and design work and refining the concept into something that holds itself together for another context, one other than film production. For example, living room entertainment with game consoles, or smaller-scale gestures with MP3 players and portable telephones, or coffee tables with screens built into them, etc.

Having looked at the science fiction side where props collapse and knot together with the activity of prototyping, thereby circulating ideas and encouraging further material production outside the context proper to the fiction, lets look at things from the side of the science of facts. In this case, the science of facts called ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp.

005

[[[ PART TWO of ONE ]]]

Part Two of One: In which a design fiction practice called “ubicomp” is illuminated revealing an edge case in which science fact and science fiction swap properties so much that it is revealed that science fiction and science fact are so entangled as to be usefully and fruitfully indistinguishable.

I’m going to start with a slightly murky science-fact — the science-fact of ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp. It’s somewhere in the middle of science-fact and science-fiction, which is exciting. Ubicomp is a science-fact that’s has snagged itself somewhere between the here and the “out there” of the near future. It’s somewhere between corporate sponsored research and development, and cyberpunk science fiction.

It started with a

It’s also relevant to the design fiction topic that some of the best ubicomp research has been presented in sci-fi film. For example, the Minority Report scene described earlier. In this case, the inbetween-ness is relevant. We can see how Philip K. Dick, Spielberg and Cruise together with a team of prop designers and technical consultants are, arguably, doing better ubicomp than ubicomp researchers do themselves. In fact, it is the case that P.K. Dick, Spieldberg and Cruise are ubicomp researchers, they just don’t know it, at least not yet. Their linkage to ubicomp proper is provided by an entry point named John Underkoffler, who brought a bit of M.I.T. to the production, validating and circulating the ideas of the laboratory in which he was a member.

Based on the terms of CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE which is one of the primary goals of scientific research, the FILM is much more effective and perhaps even more relevant than the more generally understood way of creating and sharing scientific knowledge. The film adds a kind of mass to the IDEAS of ubicomp by circulating this imaginary of a user interface to computers that does not use the typical keyboard and mouse configuration.

Can you imagine explaining such a gestural interface to a layperson used to the conventions of the canonical trinity of keyboard-video-mouse, without a story to help fill-in the broader, inevitable question of — why would anyone want this? Of what use might it be? And, given the chance to say — hold on, let me show you a little bit of what I’m imagining; it’s science fiction, but still — I think it will help give your imagination a bit of an anchor, it will help explain what I am talking about. If you watch this, we will have a bit of shared, fictional imaginary space in which we can continue our conversation about this thing — this weird thing — that I am thinking about. It makes you think that any good scientist should also be particularly good at science fiction. In fact, imagine how science fiction could be part of a better science and engineering curriculum, despite what the official curriculum sanctioning boards say.

That doesn’t tell you a whole lot about ubicomp if you’re not already a practicing ubicomp guru, or read-up on the literature, which would be hard for you to do if you weren’t already tied closely to either ubicomp or to academia because it’ll cost you an arm and a leg to get access to the literature from ubicomp practitioners because academic publishers make you pay lots to get to the material. A subscription to the SpringerLink journal “Personal and Ubiquitous Computing” — one of the more prestigious journals in the ubicomp field, you’d shell out over $1,100 for a year’s subscription. That’s 8 issues. That’s definitely more than the price of admission for a sci-fi film, or the cost of a Philip K. Dick sci-fi book, either of which will almost certainly have more good ubicomp in them than a stodgy journal.

Maybe you have access through your job, or if you’re a student at a university chances are the library has it, but the irony is that ubiquitous computing knowledge, at least from the science-fact researchers who shape the field — it’s hardly ubiquitous. For most people who watch the film, I would say that the dominant imaginary of what a computer is is disrupted more powerfully through the Minority Report scene than the conventional scientific paper publishing mechanism of circulating new ideas about digital technology.

[[[Bell and Dourish introduction]]]

I’d rather not attempt a precise definition of ubicomp, mostly because a definition can easily be contested as to its completeness, and problems as to its exclusion or inclusion of certain artifacts, people and situations. More relevant to this essay would be a few well-placed stakes in the ground that delineate a small contour of some relevant aspects of the ubicomp practice. That is to say that, rather than offering a one-for-all definition of ubicomp, a description of certain of its characteristics relevant to this topic of an in-between science fact and science fiction could suffice, especially if they get us closer to the matter of concern here, which is to understand ubicomp as a kind of science fact that is also a kind of science fiction.

So, rather than providing my own definition of ubicomp, i’ll describe it through two papers written by two colleagues who are both well-regarded ubicomp scientists. Paul Dourish is a computer scientist, and Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist. They’ve worked at places like Xerox PARC and Intel and the University of California, so they know what they’re talking about. They’ve done ubicomp from a number of angles. Ubicomp is a practical matter for them — something to be constructed — as well as something to be understood and studied in itself, as a way of making technoculture. And their essays capture two properties quite well — better than I could do it on my own, certainly. The ubicomp properties of interest are the relationship of ubicomp to the future; and the relationship of ubicomp to science fiction. Each of these properties are aspects of ubicomp that Bell and Dourish describe in the two essays I will present shortly.

Before, I should say that the stakes that I will place to trace this contour, as I say, are meant to describe a relevant aspect of a unique technoscientific endeavor. Ubicomp is not your typical technoscience. In what ways is it atypical? What are its properties that make it distinctive from other technoscience?

The broad context of the near-future it envisions, with sweeping, embedded implications that go beyond the typical mold of modest, small, incremental adjustments to life-lived. The proximate future that is today, only improved, where things go up and to the right on a graph of progress.
Its rich imaginary of a world where computers melt into the fabric of our material existence, sinking away from us yet still doing relevant processes that are away from the keyboard, operating ambiently, indirectly and quietly has such resonances with science-fiction that, as I will argue below, forces one to consider that ubicomp is actually more science-fiction than science-fact.

Bell and Dourish wrote a couple of provocative and quite insightful papers. One was published in 2006 in that expensive journal — Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. The paper back in 2006 — it’s an essay, really — is called “Yesterday’s tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision.” I was able to get it because I have access to the electronic versions of these journals through Nokia, which buys these journals for its researchers to read. This one essay says about as much about ubicomp and what it is as we’ll need for the time being, so this is where we’ll start. It provides an entry point into the knot that ties science fact to science fiction and, in that messy entanglement, in the act of the knotting together, describes what I mean by design fiction.

SLIDE - YESTERDAY’S TOMORROWS

SECTION TITLE: First contour of ubicomp — it’s relationship to the near future

In “Yesterday’s tomorrows”, Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish describe ubicomp as an endlessly deferred vision of technology for the future. They reach back to the canonical essay on the topic, written by ubicomp’s avuncular visionary, thought-leader and one of its founding scientists, Marc Weiser.

Weiser set out a vision of the future, through what he called “the computer of the 21st century.” Bell and Dourish ask themselves: what does it do to this unusual technology enterprise to base its endeavors on a vision of the future, when most technology enterprises base their endeavors on a problem rooted in the past that is meant to be overcome or mitigated in the future through the hard work and tireless efforts of science and technology?

The dilemma that arises is that this shared vision first expressed by Weiser and then taken up in full-force by ubicomp scientists internationally had this explicit deadline of sorts: The computer for the 21st century. After more than a decade and snug in the 21st century, they say, “we now inhabit the future imagined by [the ubicomp pioneers]. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined.” (first page) This isn’t a reason to dismiss ubicomp, of course. It wasn’t that it necessarily expected to achieve a specific deadline. It set a goal of sorts, but the goal was more a way of creating a shared imaginary about the near future, as if to say “the ideas developed here, in our labs, are what we imagine to be pervasive, mass-market, vernacular experiences in a couple of decades. This is how we’ll work together, to make this entirely possible near future.” This notion of a “proximate future” as Bell and Dourish describe it, is as an aspiration, a near future-imaginary — is an important property of ubicomp — the future “just around the corner.”

How is this future “just around the corner” expressed by ubicomp practitioners? Bell and Dourish unearthed papers from that expensive journal and equally expensive conference proceedings. They showed that, over a span of three years from 2001 until 2004, 47% of these papers orient themselves towards this notion of things just about to happen, or advances almost ready for prime-time.

“Internet penetration will shortly reach..” “We are entering a period when..” “New technological opportunities are emerging that..” “Mobile phones are becoming the dominant form of..” [page]

I’ve only described this one peculiar property that Bell and Dourish point out, whereby ubicomp has this curious relationship to the future. Effectively it is working on the future in a way that most other technology enterprises are not able to do, or in fact are not allowed to do. Speculating about possible futures is a relatively dangerous thing for science-fact to do. After all, it could come out wrong. Most science-fact works under the assumption that there are facts out there to be revealed and, with enough time, this revelation will come to pass. For example, there is a combination of chemistry and mechanics that will create a battery that lasts longer than the batteries of today. It might include a mix of dried oats and naphthalene, but with enough time and energy and commitment, a new battery chemistry will be found that lasts 5% longer and weighs 5% less. That is the incremental approach. Quite conservative, safe and boring. You create just a bit more of what exists today. Small increments to provide points of differentiation in crowded commercial market places. Add one more feature to your designed object that distinguishes it from the next guy. Hardly ever a flash-bang shift, unless the shackles are undone by the guys with blue shirts, and yellow ties. Better yet, if they’re just not around to bother to tell you what is and is not possible in the near future.

What the idea of a “proximate future” says about ubicomp — whatever it might be by example, I’m just presenting a few contours of it — is that it works on a future endlessly deferred, always off on the horizon, a kind of future that is always only imagined and never quite becomes material form in the same way as that of the guys working hard to make laptop batteries that last 5% longer. This is different from a future that is assumed will come to be with enough funding and time and computer workstations and graduate students to run tedious all-night experiments. The ubicomp future is a future imagined and discussed through speculative, prototype objects. In an unspoken way, it is a science created to encourage conversations about possible futures objects of speculative design, not possible future objects of manufacturing. It is a very different future, much different than the kind of logistical future that many technical enterprises use as their vision of how things will come to be. In effect, ubicomp is a kind of fiction, working with and through science to project possible near future worlds.

SLIDE - RESISTANCE IS FUTILE [[[ Putting Ubicomp Against Science Fiction ]]]

[[[

Second contour of ubicomp — its relation to science fiction through a story of mine, and RESISTANCE IS FUTILE
This can show us that it is the case that “problems of cultural context” (described often as consequences or implications, furthering this sense that they are things that issue forth from technical objects once they are deployed into the wild), arise in the imagining of them. (“I can imagine that this might have implications for those concerned about privacy.”) The problem is that its not an integral part of the practices of technology design to “imagine” much beyond the necessary cobbling together of protocol stacks, APIs and construction of hardware and software systems.

Need to fill in what this prior-to sort of imaginary is. How does it precede design?

CONCLUSION 1.: PROPERTY SWAPPING is what they’re describing, and why shouldn’t aspects of science-fiction swap with aspects of science-fact and science-fact with science-fiction?

CONCLUSION 2.: Imagine broadly, as if you were making science fiction. “Author” stories; make props that “prototype” the implications you imagine. Shape and iterate design that are based on instrumental principles and the bits that come from these broad, contextual stories. ]]]

Another essay that Bell and Dourish wrote more recently, which has not yet been published but will sometime soon, has the pre-publication/do-not-cite title of “‘Resistance is Futile’: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing”

The essay starts with the premise that any kind of research activity, such as ubicomp, that has elements of exploratory design associated with it is going to be engaged in some collective imagining. If ubicomp is about a proximate, near future — something that does not exist — how does a group of researchers base its ideas? What is it that ties these researchers together, giving them a common set of goals, aspirations, language and a sense of community? These are researchers in different parts of the world and, for a technical practice, quite interdisciplinary. There are pretty serious anthropologists and other social scientists working alongside of equally serious hardware engineers. What are the shared visions of this endlessly deferred future that serve as an index? What do ubicomp researchers point to and draw from in order to describe the ideas they imagine, but have not yet materialized?

In “Resistance is Futile” Bell and Dourish put ubicomp alongside five examples of science fiction that they find offers a common ground for the ubicomp collective imagination. The science fiction they offer are five visual stories that became popular through television and film. I’ll list them, assuming they won’t change between now and when the paper is actually published: Dr. Who, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Blake’s 7 and Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

These are five television shows that ubicomp researchers are likely to have grown up with, we might imagine. Or, for younger researchers, they will have an awareness of these shows to one degree or another, perhaps through re-runs, or sequels to, for example, Star Trek or the modern rendering of Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The juxtaposition of science fiction alongside of ubicomp is intriguing in itself, particularly for the gadget-y geek-y fans of either who are likely to be drawn into an analysis that reveals the way one shapes the other’s practices. Even more intriguing is that it is ubicomp researchers who are doing the analysis. It’s not a sideline critic or someone without a vested interest.

Bell and Dourish extract certain broad themes that are matters of concern both within the drama of the science-fiction, as well as within the science-fact of ubicomp. For example […infrastructure?…] or […?…]

What is most intriguing about this essay, and a point they make clearly in their conclusions is that they weren’t attempting to provide an exhaustive analysis. As they point out, it would certainly be possible to line up some other science fiction material alongside ubicomp, other television shows, or science fiction film for example, and they are hopeful that others will do precisely this.

They crucial argument and what I think is the most exciting part of their essay is this: prior to design, comes the imagining. Design itself isn’t the “imagination” part of the work. The imagining always is happening before you sit down to reconcile what you’ve been thinking about with the expression of that imaginary in some material way. Moving from imagination to material always requires some apparatus, some idiolect, some set of disciplinary practices, a “form” through which to express your imagination in a way that can be shared and circulated as a cultural object.

The engagement with science fiction happens through this curious, unusually aspirational bit of science fact — ubicomp. It is a way to materialize some of the imagination of science fiction, and it just happens that this happens through science fact, called ubicomp.

[[[The science fact and science fiction swap properties. The imagination precedes the design. Ubicomp is fan art for gadget geeks.]]]

Oftentimes the bias is to consider this the work of artists, or others who’s classes are somewhere on the other side of campus. Artists and designers and architects dream. Engineers are pragmatic; given a problem, there’s a procedure and well-defined set of instruments to consider that problem and turn it into a goal to be achieved.

[[[ Here showing that imagination is always part of the design process, maybe before it(?). If imagination is crucial, but engineering allows itself to be blind to this broader context, then it should be inserted into the practice in some form. How? First allow that science fiction and science fact can swap properties, that they can be interchangeable. ]]]

[[[ What Bell and Dourish are telling us is this: social or cultural “issues” are always already part of the context for design. These are not issues that arise from a technical object once it is delivered to people, as if this act of putting an object in someone’s hands then somehow magically transforms it into something that, now set loose to circulate in the wild cultural landscape, produces issues.

it is not the case that the social or cultural “issues” that are not immediately integrated into the operational procedures of the engineering part of the work are already there;

They do not follow after the engineering work is completed, or arise consequently, once the engineering object is set loose in the wild netherlands of “culture.” and we might define “issues” as all things for which there is not a procedure, or well-defined data structure, or an opensource API — all of these things that stand out as perhaps intractable problems from the perspective of engineering design, these things are relegated to a bin of either irrelevant to the immediate goals, something to be worked out later, not our problem, relevant and important, yet not yet relevant and important (things to be dealt with after deployment, for example, so that launch dates can be made, or publication deadlines reached)

“Technological problems — problems of power management, calibration, secure data exchange, user interface design, location sensing, and so forth — are problems for today, and problems of cultural context are ones that come into play later, once our technological infrastructure rolls out into the world. However, what we have tried to show here is that these questions are ones that arise not in the deployment of technologies but in the imagining of them — an imagining that arises before design.” [p.12] ]]]

Prior to design comes the imagining. How do you imagine? Through this diffracting lens that, in this case, we can call science fiction.

They’re doing a classic literary criticism maneuver of putting one bit of culture alongside of another and showing intriguing, meaningful linkages between the two. This adds to ones appreciation of, in this case, ubicomp and science fiction as cultural

What we get for their effort is an extra layer of meaning that is not directly apparent without the kind of comparative analysis that Bell and Dourish provide.

Bell and Dourish make the case that reading ubicomp against science fiction allows ubicomp practitioners to “..defamiliarize the contexts of technology development and use so that we can reflect upon underlying, and often implicit, assumptions that constrain our thinking.” [p.12]

“What we have attempted to demonstrate here is that by reading ubiquitous computing literature against science fiction literature, and by examining these two different yet related ways of conceiving of the relationship between science and society, we can cast light upon the contexts in which technology is deployed and the narratives that motivate specific sorts of designs — narratives of progress, individualism, surveillance, etc.” [p.12]

It’s like they’ve said out loud that ubicomp and sci-fi are related some how, with sci-fi providing a basis for the community imaginary that helps practitioners envision this common future that they then soldier back to the laboratory to build…out of microcontrollers and camera phones and wireless networks and rfid tags and retina scanners and all kinds of things.

[[[ CONCLUSION 1.]]] Their analysis, exciting as it is, stops short of the “property swapping” kind that is at the basis of my imaginary, mythical notion that science fact and science fiction are so deeply interweaved that the distinction is arbitrary, that they share and swap properties to achieve the end goal of creating possible near-future worlds. In fact, the myth I have been articulating is a myth only because science and rationality hold too fast to what is fact, and erect large berms around that which gets to count as a matter of fact.

How can science hold so fast to fact and rationality?

By excluding the possibility of their being anything otherwise. Look, they just state it plainly, without an explanation as to “why” — it just is:

“By reading these two bodies of work together, we are not suggesting that they are equivalent or interchangeable; we want to read ubiquitous computing alongside science fiction, not to read ubiquitous computing as science fiction”

[[[Well, why not? It sounds like they are precisely interchangeable. Or, rather should be either described as interchangeable or made interchangeable. Why?]]]

And that making the distinction does more harm than good. [[this is because you loose participants who can expand the vision; you loose the ability to imagine broadly; you loose the ability to circulate widely; knowledge becomes conservative and restricted; ]]

that would not otherwise be there were each of the two things left alone, or if it were that thing left unspoken as if ubicomp researchers were not allowed to admit that, sure, they find inspiration and can trace some influence back to their fascination with sci-fi.

SLIDE - UBICOMP IS FAN ART BUT DONE WITH SCIENCE

It’s like they’ve described ubicomp as a kind of fan art for sci-fi fans who are perhaps better at building digital stuff than they are at painting, or writing sci-fi fan stories. [Penley]

SLIDE - UBICOMP and SCI-FI

The top is sci-fi alongside of ubicomp, the sort of analysis Bell & Dourish have done so remarkably. The bottom schematic is sci-fi entangled and knit together with ubicomp, bringing them closer together in practice to the point where there is no clean boundary between the two. The web is much denser than this and more of a knotted hair ball, in terms of the interconnections and relationships.

The properties of science-fiction and science-fact swap vigorously, and when you trace those interconnects, and you follow the swapping of properties, you begin to see something hybrid and refreshing and a certain clarification comes into focus that gradually changes the relationship between an idea and its materialization, and even what counts as an idea that can be materialized. And this is what I mean by Design Fiction.

[[[ STILL CONCLUSION 1. ]]] SLIDE - MINORITY REPORT GOOGLE / YOU TUBE

Let me show you what I mean briefly. What I have here are a sequence of visual stories that show this swapping of properties. They’re here to fill in this myth in which science-fiction and science-fact are so entangled and the boundaries so porous that it becomes difficult to distinguish them as separate. Then, because of this, design fiction is a practice by which one is able to imagine many possible futures, speculate outside of the convention of what is reasonable in a “science-fact” sense of things, and stretch the imagination and materialize this imagination by constructing things.

SLIDE - Minority Report Through The Years

Arthur C. Clarke, paraphrase: It’s impossible to predict the future, but a good sci-fi author can imagine and tell a story about possible futures.

And this should be the ability of the good science-fact professional — to author, through ideas, computer code, industrial design, etc — a compelling story about possible futures.

In Part 2 what I go on to describe are how the engineering prototype and the film prop swap properties, and then we see how film, which we are talking about here, becomes an instrument for the sciences (science-fact and science-fiction) to materialize the imagination of designers and express a compelling vision of the future they imagine.

Extending Bell & Dourish, what I am presenting here is precisely this: that, in the ubicomp case, science-fact can be closely entangled with science-fiction, the advantages of looking at this state of affairs is that you get the best of both worlds.

cf. Near Future Blog Post on Charlie’s Diary, and think about near future sf as “getting from here to there” but in material ways, construction, making things. Would Tom Sachs then be the equivalent but in the past? Or are we just looking at him for the made aspects, as the result of an effort of craftspeople?

[[[ CONCLUSION 2. LEADING INTO PART 2, PROPS & PROTOTYPES ]]] […]

On the side of science fiction / minority report
On the side of science fact / ubicomp
Not so clean or anchored one side to the other / dark knight, jurassic park (SGI ad, Time magazine ad), 2001 prop making, Tom Sachs the point about not fetishizing the materialization

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Design fiction knows that expressing the imagination and instantiating our ideas is a human fundamental. And in the making we then shape the imagination, both ours and others, and through the circulation of ideas and aspirations for change, futures come to be.