Organizing and hosting this panel was a high point as it validated the thesis of Design Fiction as a relevant and complimentary approach, mindset and methodology for doing ‘futures work’. Having Stuart Candy, Jake Dunagen, Sascha Pohflepp, Jennifer Leonard and, of course, Bruce Sterling participate further underscored that validation.

Well, last Saturday the SXSW panel I had proposed on Design Fiction presented our stuff. It was 7 minutes each for myself, Sascha Pohflepp, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagen with Jennifer Leonard doing an excellent job of wrangling and moderating. We invited Bruce Sterling up for the discussion session and he lofted several excellent flash-bangs, many of which are still ringing in the #defi search on Twitter. We’ll have to wait for the video.

There was, of course, so much more to finish and I promised myself I’d put together in a blog post what I had hopelessly hoped I would be able to cram into 7 minutes — but which I quickly realized as I was doing the final assembly would never, ever fit in that short a time. So, I limited myself quite a bit as we had agreed as a panel so that we could have a productive and fruitful presentation.

Thanks to Hugh Forrest and the whole South by Southwest crew for helping make this all go super smooth.

My original post on the proposal:

It’s so far away I can barely see to it, but at SXSW 2010, in March a bunch of us will be doing a panel called Design Fiction:Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas. I managed to wrench the longer description I had written into the SXSW panel proposal form with some edits, but I’ll give you the original here, along with the original title, which wouldn’t fit..

Design Fiction: Using Props, Prototypes and Speculation In Design

This panel will present and discuss the idea of “design fiction”, a kind of design genre that expresses itself as a kind of science-fiction authoring practice. Design fiction crafts material visions of different kinds of possible worlds.

Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material can be seen as a kind of practice close to writing fiction, creating social objects (like story props) and experiences (like predicaments or scenarios). In this way, design fiction may be a practice for thinking about and constructing and shaping possible near future contexts in which design-led experiences are created that are different from the canonical better-faster-cheaper visions owned by corporate futures.

This panel will share design fiction projects and discuss the implications for design, strategy and technology innovation. In particular, how can design fiction bolster bolster the communication of new design concepts by emphasizing rich, people-focused storytelling rather than functionality? How can design fiction become part of a process for exploring speculative near futures in the interests of design innovation? What part can be played in imagining alternative histories to explore what “today” may have become as a way to underscore that there are no inevitabilities — and that the future is made from will and imagination, not determined by an “up-and-to-the-right” graph of better-faster-cheaper technologies.