A conversation with Steve Fisher that gets into my personal history with futures, design, science-fiction, engineering and how all of that led to instantiating design fiction as a practice. We talk about the artifacts of imagination, how we can use design fiction to think about the future, and how we can create a more imaginative future.

We get into the importance of imagination as an evolutionary advantage and how we can exercise our imaginative muscles to navigate the rapidly changing world we live in. I also share some early days experiences with technology, building my first computer and why that was so important to me. It was a Xerox 820 — a popular single board computer that you could find at amateur radio fairs and the like.

You'd have to find a case, get a power supply, all the cables and find a monitor and disk drive (8-inch floppy drive!) to make it work. It was fun to build and finally get it to boot into CP/M..but then there was this weird thing where the “reason” for doing it would be a bit evasive until I realized much later that it was about the process and the ‘whoa cool feeling’ of imagining possibilities and circulating within a peculiar world of early homebrew computing vibes.

There was nothing I did with it after I got it to boot up and run except sort of imagine its possibilities. I think that was the point of it all. I think that’s what design fiction is about. It’s about imagining possibilities and creating artifacts that can help us think about the future in new ways.