How do you do design fiction anyway?

There are two recurring questions the we get here at Global HQ.

Where’s the restroom?

How do I do more Design Fiction?

To the second one, there’s a longer conversation as there’s the ‘how’ that is about process, and there’s the ‘how’ that’s about integrating what is for very many organizations an unknown, vanguard, peculiar, unheard of approach to sense-making.

The integration one is harder of course, because what we’re doing with Design Fiction is akin to what Bill Bowerman had to do for ‘Jogging’ back in 1967 when he had to write a book literally called ‘Jogging’ in order to make the idea of what we now hygienically refer to as ‘jogging’ even remotely legible to a public. That is to say, ‘jogging’ at one point in the mid-1960s was to a large extent so futuristic and generally only something a handful of folks at the vanguard of fitness practiced, that a mass-market paperback had to be written to explain what the heck it was. (P.S. It’s a beautiful book in that sense. I recommend it as an object lesson in how one establishes what would become a, whatever it is, $100 billion industry, and I might be completely wrong about that dollar amount but, like..yeah.)So how do Design Fiction practically speaking?

Like..you know… how do you go about it, step-wise?Here’s a chance to have a go, because one of the first things we do is go to the future and look around. This is unlike any other futures-oriented ideation practice and now is your chance to participate in just such a thing with our General Seminar platform. Season 04 is kicking off this Wed May 3rd at two times: 10a and 3p PDT (UTC-7).

You can join us and be a part of this approach as we explore the Future of Fashion.Join us on Zoom as we take a trip into people’s closets, the corner store, amble about on whatever a high street might be in the future, as well as the factory floors and sites of work to see what then may possible count as ‘fashion’, what we can learn from that, and what we can do to project into these fashion artifacts and represent the kinds of futures we prefer and would want to inhabit.This is what Design Fiction is able to do in the best of modes — not operate as a predictive mechanism but as a way of translating our hopes, fears, dreams, and desires to drive us towards creating more habitable near future worlds.See you this Wednesday. Seats are going quickly. Sign up here, and learn more here, and listen to a previous General Seminar Digest (Solarpunk!) here.