The Future Never Gets Old

The Future Never Gets Old: On Julian Bleecker
by Emmet Byrne & Susannah Schouweiler
Appearing in Tim Durfee’s Made Up: Designs Fiction

((The version I found on my computer is a text document that seems to contain, near the bottom, some red text that doesn’t seem like it made it into the final edit of the book. I also found some photos - below - with Benjamin Bratton and Norman Klein deep in conversation and not really smiling as critics will avoid such, Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Stuart Candy, and others at the opening for the exhibition that accompanied the book’s publication.))

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In a recent issue of Frieze, artist Ian Cheng discusses the future of fiction and narrative forms, describing the great “anxiety” of our age: trying to make sense of, or narrativize, a world that is constantly changing at a speed that renders traditionally relatable narratives inadequate. He proposes several qualities a narrative format of the future might possess, including one “that requires its authors to embrace contingency and irreversibly change during its making.”

The design process—concepting, prototyping, testing, refining, etc.—might embrace this quality, and Julian Bleecker is determined to explore its narrative potential. With its context-dependent, collaborative, networked process, imagining design as a fictional medium brings a number of scenarios to mind. Entire worlds speculated from a single object. Narratives that evolve over time based on external feedback. Summoning the future into existence, one tweak at a time. And this is what Design Fiction can be: a method to summon a future, by articulating it through the rigorous process of design, exploiting the stories embedded in every object, and influencing the popular culture.

Julian Bleecker is one of Design Fiction’s main advocates and a member of Nokia’s Design Strategic Projects studio as well as a founding partner of the Near Future Laboratory, a collective dedicated to “thinking, making, design, development, and research practice speculating on the near future possibilities for digital worlds.” Over the past few years he has been developing the idea of Design Fiction as a practice that explores the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and science fact, bringing together storytelling with technology, art, design, and innovation.

As an attitude, Design Fiction has a lot in common with Critical Design as put forward by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Though where Critical Design offers tangible thought experiments exploring our personal relationships with products and consumerism—often inhabiting the space of the gallery or academia—Design Fiction appears to be oriented toward the popular imaginary, more comfortable in the realm of Hollywood films, best-selling novels, Skymall catalogs, and Internet memes, more explicitly tackling the relationship between storytelling, media, and technological progress. It is more concerned with the fog of the feedback loop of the design process itself in all its compromised and cluttered glory—the implications of business models, service design, iterative development, copyright laws, product obsolescence, hacker spaces, focus groups, Amazon Mechanical Turk, etc.—instead of the clarity of the pure artifact on its pedestal (or kitchen counter). Design Fiction does not fetishize the object, but instead foregrounds the context, the human rituals attached to a thing, the drama unfolding, the ethical issues raised, the science, and especially the transmission of an idea through popular and mass culture at large.

I’ve come to understand Design Fiction a bit like the inverse of Mundane Science Fiction, a short-lived but highly influential sub-genre of science fiction—the Dogme 95 version of scifi. It existed primarily as a manifesto, a provocation to science fiction writers, combining aesthetic ambition and clarity with political/ethical intentions. The manifesto—formatted as a list of rules—challenged writers to put aside the clichés of the genre, to avoid the escapism, and instead create plausible near future speculations. To write science fiction without relying on impossible ideas such as faster than light travel, teleportation, interactions with alien cultures, and all the typical Star Trek content that makes up what Gary Westfahl calls the “consensus future.” A Mundane Science Fiction story utilizes futuristic ideas, but only those that are within the realm of plausibility. As the best science fiction stories are elaborate thought experiments, this manifesto requires the writer to tighten their concept/premise, denying them the use of the typical shortcuts, conceivably resulting in more rigorous and original ideas. Politically, the manifesto suggested that typical galaxy-hopping science fiction operates under the general impression that we can “burn through this planet,” and move on to other worlds—an escapist perspective that requires no gesture of responsibility towards the present. They assert that there is enough happening here on earth to create the sense of wonder that science fiction and fantasy writers strive for. As a result, Mundane Science Fiction stories usually take place on Earth and in the near future.

But instead of science fiction authors toning down the fantasy to tell stories of the near future, Design Fiction represents designers amping up the speculation to “tell worlds instead of stories,” as Julian says. Both theories feel a bit scrappy but highly prize a conceptual rigor: the refusal of Mundane Science Fiction to resort to impossible (and easy) ideas, and the dedication of Design Fiction to the meticulous process of making something real. “Less yammering and more hammering,” Julian likes to say. Both ideas also readily admit to having existed long before they were formally christened, which seems appropriate—naming something as a way of calling it into existence.

And this is a charming aspect of Design Fiction, this act of summoning something. By articulating an idea, even an impossible one—by designing and narrativizing it—you make the thing more likely to exist, that particular future more legible. The gap between the present and the near future is ours to traverse at whatever speed we wish, willfully confusing the two, and it is in our hands to evenly distribute Bruce Sterling’s future if we so choose. These days it feels as if the future is already here—new products, technologies, and modes of human interaction are constantly being created, often in front of our eyes. Never before has the spectrum between fact and fiction, possible and impossible, realized and unrealized, been more clearly visualized in our daily lives. It is this feeling of imminence—of everything being on the cusp—that Design Fiction revels in. A simple example of this is Kickstarter, where products compete for crowd-sourced funding, infiltrating our Facebook feeds with personal entreaties from far-flung acquaintances accompanied by sometimes elaborately narrated video pitches. It is a universe of products and ideas that are on the verge of being realized, and are being summoned into existence, through storytelling, fundraising, and niche marketing. Another example is the work of Philip Parker—technically the world’s most published author—and his algorithmically generated print-on-demand textbooks on any subject imaginable, existing only as Amazon.com listings until the one interested person purchases it into existence, often at a ridiculous price. And even online marketplaces like Alibaba.com—a billion dollar enterprise that dwarfs American business-to-business portals—offer products that may or may not exist until enough small businesses have requested a large enough quantity to warrant production. Products exist in a pre-production state, cusping in and out of existence, until the gravitational pull of desire coalesces them into being. These examples may not feel like they represent some spectacular conflation of the present and the future, but they do illustrate how accustomed we have become to dealing in unrealized speculation. In many ways, we have become as comfortable living in the near future as we are living in the present, and this unassuming suspension of disbelief in our daily lives makes even the most fantastic Design Fiction a little easier to believe.

It is a stretch to classify anything that Paul Polak does as Design Fiction, but I’d like to reference his treadle pump project as a productive union of design and narrative, to suggest how Design Fiction thinking can easily be applied to situations that are not fantastical or critical, but pragmatic and even banal. As the progenitor of the Design for the Other 90% notion, Polak works on massive design initiatives to end poverty across the world. With IDE, he developed a cost-effective treadle pump that could raise income and productivity throughout developing countries, but for it to be effective for small farmers it had to achieve a certain threshold of name recognition. After trying a number of failed marketing strategies, they hit upon the idea of embedding the product within a Bollywood film to increase awareness. They hired a director, a male and female leads, wrote scripts that displayed the typical full range of life-altering Bollywood drama, commissioned songs written about the treadle pump, choreographed dances, and filmed several fully-realized, fully dramatized films that were shown throughout the Bangladeshi countryside. Millions of people saw these films, played on the back of traveling video-vans, and the movies are credited with distributing over two and a half million of the pumps across Asia and Africa.

In this scenario, the relationship between what is fact and what is fiction has been swapped. The treadle pump, a very real object and not fantastical in the least, is treated as the “diagetic prototype,” a prop existing in a fictional context in service of a larger narrative. The narrative—a musical about love, loss, and perseverance—is what summons forth the desired future. It may be the most mundane of science fictions, but as is en vogue these days, not all futures have to be fantastic.

This property swapping, between fictional objects and fictional contexts, is just one example of how Design Fiction aggressively blurs the boundaries between disciplines and calls many discipline-based truths into question. Science fact, for example, is inherently dependent on science fiction, Julian argues. A scientist starts with a hypothesis that is fictional and then works to prove or disprove it, at which point it slides from one end of the science fiction/science fact spectrum to the other. But what happens when you extend the fiction of the experiment further, when you conduct the experiment with wondrously fabricated data, or when you begin with a hypothesis that is seemingly impossible? What happens when science fiction and science fact muddle with each other and swap properties? When a team of scientists, designers, and filmmakers are exploring the future of gestural interfaces in a Hollywood blockbuster, as these technologies are simultaneously being created in the real world—which effort is fueling the other? Or when somewhat debatable science fiction (for example, regarding the relationship between dinosaurs and birds) forever alters the actual scientific debate, and in fact the entire world’s understanding of an issue—what is the expected responsibility of those who create fictions?

Julian and his peers at the Near Future Laboratory employ this kind of interdisciplinary thinking in every arena, for various goals including criticism, progress, curiosity, and profit. Some of them conduct workshops with institutions and corporations interested in innovation and speculation. Julian describes his work at Nokia as “ways of enhancing the corporate imagination, swerving conversations to new possibilities that are reasonable but often hidden in the gluttony of overburdened markets of sameness. Running counter to convention is part of what some kinds of science fiction—rather, design fiction—allow for. This is especially valuable in the belly of a large organization with lots of history and lots of convention.”

It was in this context that I recently invited Julian into the belly of the Walker Art Center to speak with our staff. Susannah Schouweiler, writer and editor of mnArtists.org, thoughtfully documented his presentation in which he dives into the ideas behind Design Fiction:

…Date (TK), Walker Art Center, Print Study Collection Room To begin, Bleecker describes Design Fiction for us, as “the fertile muddle where fact and fiction reflect and influence each other.” He says both design and science fiction work to open new lines of conversation, allowing people who are not inclined to think out of the ordinary, to begin to do so. “You can introduce a conversation about something quite speculative; when you’re talking about science fiction, no one says, ‘that’s impossible.’ We all understand the normal rules don’t apply.”

Design Fiction, in particular, he says, “involves thinking of the impossible as not just possible, but imminent, even likely.” But the work of Design Fiction goes much further than thinking and talking about what might be, to building on the ideas that emerge from such speculations: expanding the conversation by making something real, thereby taking it from the gossamer realms of conjecture to the work-a-day spheres of tangible, concrete probability.

He explains: “This work involves a symbiotic relationship between design fact and design fiction—things can happen because these conversations are in the world, percolating.” For example, we can see amazing, fictional technology in Hollywood films [like Minority Report, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc]—indeed, that imagined tech is itself a big draw for audiences. And in a very concrete sense those technologies are real: Someone designed a product, and designed it with an excruciating level of refinement, not just so it looks good on camera, but in such a way that the whole production team can understand how that tech fits in the story, why it’s there…. Using the lexicon established by the film to explain something real, some actual technology, it then becomes legible for a wide audience, because you have a conceptual anchor which introduces that technology (in the case of Minority Report, for example, gesture-based interfaces) into the popular imaginary. Julian references David A. Kirby, who argues that these elaborately conceived science fiction props—which he calls “diagetic prototypes”—are in a sense superior to the actual working prototypes that scientists and engineers must make to demonstrate the feasibility of a possible technology, for “in the diegesis these technologies exist as ‘real’ objects that function properly and which people actually use.” (Kirby) Julian goes on: “The fact that the device you want to make doesn’t quite work yet doesn’t negate its reality—the conversation, the continuity of relationship between the idea rendered in the film and real technology is real…. A designer working on that film did enough to get things started to where an industrialist was ready to write a check to develop it for actual use. That’s real.” Bleecker says Design Fiction involves “extrapolating from known to unknown… You can introduce a conversation about something quite speculative, but then expand that into an even more fulfilling conversation if you actually make the thing you’re talking about.” He goes on, “It’s usually a linear trajectory—from idea to prototype to materialization in some new future. You accrete more meaning in your explanation for what the future might look like as you build, get funding, and create something. You need to get it out of your head; once it’s made, you can describe it, show it and involve people in a discussion about its specifics.” Julian has written on the symbiotic interplay between Stanley Kubrick’s rigorous scientific speculation in 2001: A Space Oddysey and the contemporaneous scientific progress of America’s space race: “Collapsing science fact together with science fiction to sketch out this trajectory is perhaps the only sensible way to create such a compelling vision whilst on the historical cusp of that vision coming into being.”

The Design Fiction process of actually creating something—going from conception to execution—facilitates a kind of thoroughness that distinguishes this work from mere speculation. In fact, Bleecker’s current interests are anything but remote: he tells us, right now he’s most interested in questions about the distribution of innovation. He offers a quote from novelist William Gibson by way of explanation: “The future has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed … yet.”

Bleecker then offers this thought experiment. “I try to imagine what the end of the long tail for these innovations will look like; what does it look like at that point where future technology does become evenly distributed? Where it’s affordable, ubiquitous, mass-produced, almost junk? Like the PDA is now, or the record player, for example.”

He describes how thinking on such a question plays out in practice: I think there’s something Design Fiction-y about that question. [How does our relationship to material stuff change with time and saturation, and what are the causes of those shifting desires?] To imagine these exciting new things, these innovations, as tomorrow’s crap—to put yourself in a time when you can pick up an iPad at the dollar store for $1.99, or two for $3. It’s a very powerful way of describing what these things might look like in the future, how they might work in the culture. Designing these things in reality, describing them in this way, does a sort of Jedi mind trick: This process makes people really believe, because in our daily lives we already understand how that exciting-to-banal process works—we see it all around us.”

He argues that you can disrupt conventional futures with Design Fiction: “If you really want to tweak habits or desires, you can start design conversations with these techniques, take them beyond ‘what are the new colors/price points going to be for 2013?’” Design Fiction, he says, plays in the fringes, outside the borders of the “conventional products’ sweet spot,” where the spheres of what’s “buildable, desirable, and profitable” overlap. Design Fiction adherents are drawn beyond safe “mods and tweaks” of existing products to the fast-shifting terrain where fantasies and speculations reside, to the quicksilver trajectories of the “magical, mythical, miraculous” in our many possible futures.

In Design Fiction, he says, “stories matter more than features, specs, wireframes, and engineering… Special effects dinosaurs are more effective when used in an exciting film like Jurassic Park, than they are in a plain old documentary talking about the science of dinosaurs, because you’re enrolling viewers into a well-drawn world, and the design within that world is all the more compelling for it. … [What’s more] a persuasive big-budget film rendering of [even hotly contested] science can so capture the imagination that it changes the real-world conversation irrevocably — and can therefore change the science itself.”

He says, “It comes down to the way in which we’re able to hold people’s attention, to engage them.” It’s about finding ways—through film, design, novels—to help us all look at the world a little differently. “We’re trying to find people who look at the world a little bit sideways, for that head-slap moment when you know you’ve hit on meaningful innovation—whether that’s a little tweak that makes a huge difference (e.g. wheels on luggage) or some big new idea put in practice.”

During his presentation, Julian is asked whether “there’s something inherently ethical about showing people how the future might be different than what we accept as the consensus future? That seems to be an element of critical design practice as well. Is simply generating a meaningful conversation about what is and might be, in itself, a useful aspect of the work? Or is that not enough?”

Bleecker responds: “It’s fun to look at the world this way, to seek the head-slap moment and play with ideas; but I do think it’s also important to consider these things with a code of ethics. You’re never just doing it to do it, but to make the world a little bit better. Sometimes that’s been a very First-World thing I’ve made better because of a new design—like calling your mother gets a little easier, a little better, more enjoyable. But always embedded in the design work is the idea that we’re in the business of making things a little more playful, happier, and less unnerving for people.”

“And simply bringing an appreciation of the fact that the future isn’t determined,” he says, “that the future, on an individual scale, is still open to one person’s vision of what that can be”—that’s valuable in its own right, too.

Why do I blog this?
A fun piece of writing worthy of standing as a moment of consideration at a point in time along the trajectory of Design Fiction's evolution. Needn't be lost, so I put it here with gratitude to Emmet, Susannah, Tim and Mimi and for a moment of generous and vibrant association with Art Center Graduate School of Design.