Another ‘What Is Design Fiction?’ video.
Archeologist help us make sense of worlds long ago for which there are only ‘artifacts’ that represent these worlds and their cultures and rituals.
Design Fiction is like this only we’re Archeologists who dig into the future rather than dig into the past.
Another analog is to think of Design Fiction as a special kind of signal processor.
When I was studying Electrical Engineering, one of the core courses was called ‘Signals and Systems’, and it was taught by Professor David Delchams who was brilliant for his clarity as well as his mastery of the principles.
Much of it comes down to trying to discover the character of ‘black boxes’ — things we can’t open up and explore directly but we can put a bunch of signals into — and observe the signals that come out. If you do this enough, you can make some informed conclusions as to the black box itself. The black box is like an audio filter. Sound goes in, gets filtered and processed, and then comes out the other end having been filtered and processed.
Design Fiction is a signal processor. It takes your ‘weak signals’, and tunes into them. Design Fiction processes these weak signals to make them significanly more sensible, legible, and audible. It resolves them in a variety of formats, like tuning into a radio station from far away, that is a bit staticy and noisy. It considers what the signal from some possible future might imply about the world from which it has come.
Design Fiction does this through synthesis and sense-making.
The way we do this synthesis and sense-making here at Near Future Laboratory is unique to our experiences as the organization that established Design Fiction. We have a variety of platforms including General Workshops, General Seminars, facilitated discussions, analytic surveys, and so forth.
It then produces the transformation and translation of these signals into material cultural artifacts that speak directly to the hu
Now think of Design Fiction as
