Design Fiction 101 Workshop at Chapman University

Every workshop I facilitate brings fresh insights into the ways to tap into the creative insights that are lurking in our imaginations but have difficulty finding their materialization — getting them ‘on the page’ in some fashion. These students are quite lucky in that they have a prediliction still towards expansive imagining — that is, they are not in the mode of considering even the peculiar and adjacent weird things as not even worth saying, let alone considering. So — they got the exercise immediately and got straight to work to do that first difficult step of immediately capturing and expressing their ideas.

The butcher paper is another simple and useful platform to begin this work. Not using a computer and just drawing things out without care or consideration that, perhaps one’s drawing skills are inadequate or will result in embarassment, etcetera.

Jillian was excited to have her students use the cards from the 2023 Work Kit of Design Fiction, and it was important to emphasize that these are not the answers, but rather a kind of prompt to help locate and situate possibilities.

After a ‘Design Fiction 101‘ presentation describing the motivation and purpose and sensibility of the speculative design approach, we had time left for about a one hour hands-on workshop. The brief was roughly this:

Imagine you’ve found yourself in a possible future in which AI is as normal, ordinary, and everyday as wheels on luggage or televisions you talk to. You find yourself looking for evidence in the material cultural world to help understand the hopes, fears, dreams, and dreads of the world. You cannot talk to anyone. But, you find a newspaper and in that newspaper you find articles, advertisements, and the like.

Through these things you begin to get an understanding about the world. For your task, create something you would literally find in the newspaper — literally draw it out as your output for the task. If it’s an article, represent it as might be seen — headline, subhead, photo/image. If it’s a display advertisement, block it out with enough detail that we can comprehend what is being sold. You don’t need to write the complete copy, but you do need to do enough representation that someone could begin to puzzle through what’s going on and what it might indicate about the world. Think of Design Fiction as worldbuilding from the ground up, rather than from the ‘top down’.

Chapman University Design Fiction 101 Talk & Workshop

I went back to Chapman University to give a Design Fiction 101 talk with a wonderful group of students in Jillian Warren's course. We followed that with an interactive discussion and questions, and then the fun part — a practical component, hands-on, where we went into a possible future and imagined that future through artifacts that the students ‘found’ there.