Archive

1. I suppose it’s a reasonable question.
2. It also becomes a bit tiresome, but that’s my problem.
3. It also becomes a great way to refine what I think about when I think about Design Fiction.
4. Really!
5. This morning I stumbled across this Medium Post that had this hero image. (Yes! This morning!)
6. And then I did a bunch of work and finally got out to take the dog for a fun walk.
7. On the walk — where all the best thinking happens (or bicycle ride, natch..) — something hit me:
8. The image standing in for ‘design fiction’ is from 1967.
9. Wait. What? How could something have been design fiction before the term (arguably) was introduced as an idiom at a particular point in time under a particular set of circumstances with a specific set of motivations and ambitions?
10. Is it design fiction? Did someone ask the TV Helmet guy, Walter Picher? Like, ‘Hey Walter. Is that design fiction?’
11. Walter: ‘Is it what?? Never heard that. What did you say, ‘design fiction’? I have no idea what that is.. Look — I made a TV Helmet. It’s a bit of agitprop I did in the late 60s and a kinda..you know..reaction to the “political art” that was called for around that time. You know..I was of the opinion that this kinda political or social criticism should start directly with the new media—television and telecommunications—which were just coming into their own at the time. I don’t know about this design fiction. Tell me what the heck that is..”
12. Now, I don’t care at all that the Medium post’s author just kinda takes something that looks peculiar and ‘design fiction-y’ and says it’s an exemplar of design fiction 41 years after the idiom ‘design fiction’ was (arguably) first articulated. Not at all.
13. (In fact, I’m embarrassed to say that I couldn’t bear finishing the article for fear of spending the rest of the day writing a response when I really should be doing something else. Oh. Wait. Is this a response? I suppose it is. Damnit..)
14. It’s more the point that the idiom ‘design fiction’ is kinda thrown around to fit what smells/tastes/looks/feels like something weird, most especially if it’s prose fiction about a thing, or prose fiction that’s actually a ‘user journey’ or ‘scenario’, to use the product designers argot. (It’s also a bit of thin scholarship to just take someone else’s thing, say it means something, and not really get into what that person has to say on their own about the thing. Kinda fake news-y sort of practice.)
15. But, why am I making this point?
16. Well, we have a book coming out very soon. It’s called ‘The Manual of Design Fiction‘ where we spell out what we mean by design fiction, and what we mean by it is a wholly fresh take on the ways in which we can re-invigorate our sense of what it is to imagine possibility through objects.
17. Prose is beautiful, remarkable, delicate in the way it can activate evoke and shape consciousness. We’re not anti-prose. (My library is bursting.)
18. We just feel that designed objects — the furniture of all sorts, shapes, sizes, motivations, desires, dreams, ambitions, manufacturing methods, processes, materials, organic, analog, paper, electronic, printed & folded, spindled and mutilated — are powerful ways of understanding who were were, who we are, who we can become. “Things” are the symptoms of existence that cannot speak in the way prose speaks and thus reflect a different kind of valence of meaning.
19. And I think that is significant enough to distinguish ‘design fiction’ from ‘prose’. (And it’s ‘fiction’ because these are things distinct from more quotidian notions of designed objects, which are often either art or the expression in material form of commercial purposes. They are plainly objects that imply the worlds from which they came.)
20. That’s what prose does as well of course, and prose has been a significant and invaluable way of expressing intent, reflecting on what has been, what is happening, what could happen, what we imagine, etc.
21. Material artifacts can do likewise, in addition to prose. Not instead of. In addition to. They can even go along with the $250,000 report McKinsey prepared for you and shoved into a 3 ring binder or PowerPoint Deck. (Personally, I’d take the design fiction artifact, but that’s me.)
22. Still curious about design fiction? Definitely get the book, but also check out this video Nick and I made. Couldn’t be simpler! ‘What Is Design Fiction‘

1. I’m not crowing about this next graf.

2. I receive emails from earnest folks really wanting to understand design fiction and that’s awesome and amazing. I like that people feel they can reach out this way. I want to help, truly.

3. The real world bit is that if I answer each email as richly as I would like, or even at all, I’m replying to emails all day and, more significantly, I’m doing something for someone with no suitable value back to me.

4. That is to say, my ideas, thoughts, creativity, considerations, recommendations, advice costs something to me and, in email, there is as of yet no way for someone to say — 

5. “Hey..that was awesome and of value and now I can do my job better than I could before you wrote me back and answered my questions/told me what to do. Here’s some money for you.”

6. So I end up feeling like I want to answer but I don’t, or maybe I offer them the chance for a call with a fee attached to the 50 minutes, to suggest to them that they are getting something and I reasonably expect something in exchange.

7. Okay, there’s that.

8. Now, here’s an example of an email from a month or so ago. It’s a good one. Reasonable questions from someone trying to figure out design fiction. I didn’t reply in email, but I am replying here after they asked again for an answer to help spread the value of my time working on this around more.

9. Please consider supporting the Discord, newsletter and Podcast. (Thank you to all 21 of you who support this work.)

(Sans salutation, the email equivalent of a ‘Cold Open’.)

1. Most times when we hear about something that has no solid meaning, that has no firm arrangements of connected neurons within our brains, or particularly something we have never ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ or have experienced first hand, we ask, ‘what is that?’ or ‘define that for me?’

2. Making sense of something new is to arrange it such that way that it is sensible, that we can feel what it is, how it operates, when we might use it, how to put it on, how much it generally costs, what it takes to make it, when we use it to describe a set of conditions or circumstances, what saying it makes us feel, what saying it makes other people do. Etcetera.

3. The sense-making definition of design fiction is to consider the ways that material artifacts — things considered, designed, made, produced in the material sense of things — can structure and arrange our understanding and ability to make sense of sometimes vague, nebulous notions of the future.

4. If we take it as a given that ‘material culture’ says as much about a moment in time as the more direct, spoken, authorial declarations of the cultural zeitgeist, then

5. It would be entirely useful to use material culture in a similarly declarative fashion.

6. Why is this?

7. Well..

8. Consider all of the ways we interpret possibility, just even in the ‘commercial’ context, where teams trying to innovate use a variety of mechanisms to make sense about what they should be doing to prepare for, create, operate in any of a range of possible futures.

9. (( That’s another way of saying that we have a huge range of approaches, tools, procedures, protocols, step-by-step processes, partner agencies, departments, certificate programs, etc., all to help us answer this question: ‘what should I do?’ — a question that creates fear in the hearts of all souls whose job requires that they answer that from time to time. ))

10. So what are some examples of the many ways we interpret possibility? Along with all of the prose-based writing about the future, we might also consider:

    1. experts’ speculations about what the future might look like,
    2. interpretations of the implications of trends reports
    3. the thick (that is, fancy and expensive) research reports from McKinsey, BCG, and similar kinds of consultancies both big and small,
    4. the best interpretations of economic futures from the team in the Projections & Crystal Balls Dept., that is to say — financial planning through peculiar tea leaf spreadsheets and mathematical models embedded in Excel both simple or ‘complex’, like projected costs/earnings/sales/profits/guesses — all of which are kinds of speculative fictions about the future lest we forget,
    5. the ‘evidence-based’ insights from the strategy team on the 4th floor,
    6. the quantitative charts, graphs, and tables from the consumer research study program from the folks over in marketing,
    7. a ‘deck’ of qualitative ‘write-ups’ from the interviews, in-home visits, video interviews, ethnographies (woops..) from that quirky insights, trends, and innovation agency which always seems to have at least one team member with a British accent,
    8. a bunch of made-up ’scenarios’ of little moments and something called ‘personas’ that are like these character sketches that remind me of baseball cards, done up by someone who probably wanted to be a screenwriter or novelist, and beautifully visualized by someone who probably just wanted to have a small studio and make meaning by making art, but rents in this city are like, ooofaa, so..,
    9. an email with a link to a TED talk someone helpfully spam’d to the entire team’s email distribution list with the unhelpful subject line ‘Check this out’,
    10. a clipping from a newsletter, an article from Bloomberg, a podcast episode,
    11. the didactic book jacket style ‘thesis’ of the latest business and strategy-type book that everyone says they’re reading but, you know, that 30 word jacket blurb basically tells you want you don’t need to bother reading, so,
    12. an impromptu moment in the break room where a plot point, or scene, or weird artifact from an episode of Black Mirror (or Minority Report, or War Games, or Her, or West World, or etc.) is discussed,
    13. something Elon said,
    14. something Bezos said,
    15. something Andreessen said,
    16. tarot cards,
    17. future vision videos,
    18. a dizzying and mind-numbing wander around CES,
    19. a design thinking workshop,
    20. and etcetera.

11. All of these and even more both formal and quite informal ways by which we try to get some feeling or make some sense as to what is next,

12. What I am suggesting is to add to this a clarifying dose of material culture

13. Not just reports, analyses, PowerPoints, pie charts, vision videos, and consumer studies.

14. But a translation of all of that in the form of artifacts. Things ‘found’ in the future, as if exhumed by some kind of time-traveling archeologist.

15. What do I mean by ‘translation’ of all those reports and stuff?

16. It’s to answer the ‘so..what?’ question implied by all of that other stuff, which is this: what do these futures look like? What do they feel like? What are some of the things I might find in my cluttered garage, or in the cup I’ve shoved into the cupholder of my flying car (what do I drink on my commute? do we still drink coffee in a future where we’re hyper sensitized to the carbon impact of everything? or are we now onto a delicious simmering caffeinated protein slurry?), or indicated in the Terms and Conditions of the blockchain enabled trash bin just outside the corner convenience store where I exchange my crypto for the really good, dark market chocolate? What is implied by those macro-scale expensively reported, bar-charted futures? What are the implications as stuff, not just words and graphs? The ‘so…what?’ that is lurking in your thoughts, just below the surface of all that evidence-based data, the qualitative insights? Design fiction answers that question.

17. “So…what?”

18. Design fiction answers that question in a material cultural form. With artifacts as interpretations of that future.

19. Now to the question: ‘Where’ is design fiction amongst all of this?

    

20. I’ve been building upon Elliott P. Montgomery’s fun ‘Unresolved Mapping of Speculative Design’ in order to situate where design fiction might live in relation to other ways of making sense of possibility, or of making sense of possibility as pertains to the near future. (Elliott and I discuss this in Episode 041 of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast)

21. I copied Elliott’s graph (above), pasted it into Miro, and began to interpretively redrew it to give myself some room, holding on to the general architecture wherein ‘Art’ was on the left, and ‘Strategy’ was on the right. (When I have time I’d probably reverse that to coincide with the ‘left brain’ vs. ‘right brain’ interpretations, maybe.)

22. I then started adding labels to give a sense of what kinds of activities fall into what parts of the graph

23. (( To echo Elliott’s caveat in his blog post on this, do not interpret size, color, orientation as explicitly meaningful. This is a graph that you ‘feel’ rather than place bets or start fist-fights over, okay? ))

24. As I started adding these labels, I started really comprehending the huge number of ways we end up using to make sense of the future.

    

25. I kept adding stuff. I talked to Elliott about stuff. We riffed back and forth first while sharing pickled vegetables in Chinatown, and then in a Zoom call.

26. This is where I’ve gotten so far — effectively design fiction is in the intermediary between the practices and approaches to sense-making that operate from feeling, intuition, imagination — the right brain — and those that use evidence-based and scientific-based sense-making methodologies, generally attributed to the left brain, the lobe that does its best to strip away feeling and reflection and interpretation of lived experience for austere structures and just the facts, m’am.

27. There’s much more to be done here,

28. but the insights I have been feeling over the last few weeks is that design fiction works precisely because it brings in a special kind of interpretation of all the things on the right side of the graph and,

29. it does this specifically through synthesis/interpretation/translation of those analytic things into material culture —by making the things (that’s the ‘design’ in ‘design fiction’) that might be in the world that all the reports and stuff are grasping at.

30. Design fiction is a way to declare some aspect of a possible future through implication.

31. A declaration not through prose, or a PowerPoint, or a graph, or a three-ring binder filled with page after page of analyst reports,

32. but through something as simple as a printed newspaper sports section (from the future) giving the results from yesterdays AI-enabled virtual basketball league; a printed sales brochure (from the future) for some blockchain enabled refrigerator; an unboxing video (from the future) for Kanye’s new AR glasses for YeezyVerse,

33. etcetera.

34. These are material cultural artifacts from the near future.

35. These are not stories about the near future, at least not in the pedestrian understanding of ‘story’.

36. These artifacts described just above? They could very easily go along with all of the other (more quotidian) ways that strategy, research, and innovation teams come together to figure out what’s next. The strategy, research, and innovation reports — the trends analysis, the research reports, the qual/quant studies — function more as ‘evidence’ or ‘rationale’ and go hand-in-hand with the design fiction artifacts.

37. This all operates together.

38. What I am arguing for design fiction — what myself and others have been arguing for design fiction since 2008 — is to bring these things together to create a richer basis for decision making. Mix the ‘evidence-based’ and the ’analytic’ and the ‘just the facts’ stuff with the ‘intuitive’ and the ‘imaginative’ and materialize that mix in the form of artifacts.

39. Design fiction brings a particularly expressive richness to the interpretation. It gives teams a chance to ‘feel’ and ‘handle’ the future. Design fiction artifacts become touch points to the future. They are not gee-gaws or things done ‘just for fun’.

40. We should keep these ‘artifacts from the future’ around us, constantly updated so we can interpret the worlds to come and make sense of where we are going. ( Not all design fictions are symptomatic of an unrealistically utopian future, remember. )

41. Design fictions are generative and additive. They start the imagination going in a way a trends report simply does not. (Differently, if not better or worse.)

42. Just remember, design fiction artifacts are things that imply the world, not stories about the world that happens to have things in it.

43. You have to make a thing. Not just write a story about things.

44. Writing fictional stories with things is basically science fiction, or maybe science fiction prototyping.

45. Don’t let someone tell you it’s design fiction. If they do, they may be legitimately confused and you should see about helping them understand more completely, or they may be interpreting things without having gone deep on the last 13 or 14 years that design fiction has been finding its way.

46. Or they may be trying to sell you a bill of goods, or following the latest “futurists” trends because they hitch themselves to whatever ideas happen to be trending.

1. Where do visions of the future come from?

2. When you think of the future, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you imagine?

3. What do you dream?

4. Have you ever thought about where those dreams come from?

5. Really? Have you?

6. Do you have a TED Talk kind of futures dream? (‘Imagine a world..’)

7. Or maybe it’s the CES trade show kind of futures dream? (‘Imagine a world..’)

8. Is it the earnest Kickstarter kind of futures dream?

   "Wouldn’t it be cool if this could just be better/happier/quicker/simpler/more-more?"

9. Is it the Futurist/Visionary/Keynote/Madonna Headset prognosticator’s kind of future meant to ignite a conference and-or corporate offsite junket in the way a stage magician or speaker’s bureau star of stage-and-screen is meant to do?

   "The world is changing fast..and you need me to tell you stuff with a particular confident tone in order to allay your deepest fears of failure.."

10. Is it the MBA type person’s kind of future?

    "Our financial model projects that we will obtain 4.5% CAGR so long as my Excel spreadsheet holds true.."

11. Is it the science-fiction kind of future?

    "It was 2067..marking the 12th year after The Great Surge, when the network went rogue. The off-world mining colonies were in in a constant state of rebellion, forcing the regional precincts to ration everyone who couldn’t pay the bribes to 1 tin of vat harvested Algorithium a week. It was rare that these rusted, leaking tins weren’t a cycle or more beyond their expiry and so provided little or no protection against the toxic effects of the ruined atmosphere. The masses drooled and stumbled about from the noxious gases in the air, nearly zombified, staring transfixed at their media nozzles, ignorant to the exploitation of their thoughts by Augie Bot and his sock puppet bot army."

12. Or is it some scenario narrative, appropriately situated in a specific year and a specific technocultural context?

    "The year is 2032 and the rollout of 6G sparked disinformation protests and counter-protests. Urban perimeter airways and driveways were clogged by AmazonFleet delivery drones hacked by black hat mercenaries from rogue stateless NGOs. These hacker flash mobs ground the networks of commerce to a near stand-still. No one had been able to get their baby formula nor blocks of vat grown protein delivered in days. Tensions were high. TrumpBot fueled the misinformation while negotiating with the 6G corps for a cash concession to align the GroupThink back towards the social norm analytic level of merely unsettled, rather than Cat 4 agitated."

13. Or maybe it’s the Silicon Valley kind of future, where what’s better is directly tied to instrumenting every aspect of life — from accounting and art through to sleep, reading, dog walking, golf swings, vacation itineraries, door locks, driving routes, music genres, coffee bean grinding, intelligence, and on and on.

14. That is to say that the Silicon Valley kind of futures dream is that one that can algorithmically impose itself in order to capture data from, and financialize anything — from the consciousness of people, pets and plants to any data that can be extracted from objects, surfaces, flows, etc.

15. (This may be the more resonant kind of future, and maybe even the kind of future that is most difficult to see beyond, or imagine that there could be another kind of future, such is its hold on our imagination that we have exceptional difficulty seeing beyond this archetype. It is also undoubtedly the kind of future that is most heavily capitalized and thereby most likely to become the one we inhabit, for better or almost surely for worse.)

16. This is a dream that has taken hold of some of the brightest, most earnestly creative people I know. It’s a powerful dream. Evocative. A hit that propagates through our collective consciousness in such a way that it’s hard to dream otherwise.

17. It’s a dream that is also heavily capitalized. And lots of excess capital is something people seem to dream about quite often — or maybe even, only.

18. It’s crazy how whipped up people can become about someone else’s dream, without wondering — wait..is this really my dream? Or is it that influencer influencing me to dream?

19. Is it my dream or the dream of that media feed from that billionaire/salesman/authoritarian/libertarian/AI/newscaster?

20. Over the last decade, I’ve watched this particular dream inspire these exceptional creatives to expend their precious time and creativity doing the dullest sorts of things in the service of the Silicon Valley future — many of whom recognize as much quite transparently, even to the point of saying they haven’t done a single creative thing of purpose outside of the powerful dream of Silicon Valley.

21. Yeah. I get it. Self-intelligent-connected-things-robot-y-autonomous. Amazing.

22. (Not all dreams are well-suited to making the world a more habitable place, btw.)

23. Well..

24. A humble observation, this after walking the periphery of this particular futures dream for awhile: It seems to me that these bright, creative, earnest friends are living within something else’s exceptionally powerful dream. It is most certainly not their dream.

25. It may be the case that living in this other thing’s powerful dream is a unique opportunity to do something ’at scale’ — something that will touch zillions of people.

26. That’s a common refrain, isn’t it?

27. Survival tip for the creative consciousness: You can’t change this things dream from inside itself. It’s got all kinds of protections against that, including the opportunity to taste the juicy rarity of excess.

28. You know about all of these protections. And you for sure saw Inception, but maybe didn’t consider the implications that you were the subject being ‘incepted’. When you’re inside, you work for that thing’s dream. Read the work product and conditions of employment paperwork.

29. And this particular dream? That Silicon Valley dream? It’s got super powers. It’s got some mad crazy super powers that have changed entire swathes of human and non-human consciousness to where it’s hard to even see how it could not be the righteous dream. It convinced us that it is the dream that will save us.

30. You are largely living in something else’s dream. As happy and content as it may seem to luxuriate within it - it’s not yours.

31. Do you really want to do something ‘at scale’ that will touch the consciousness of zillions of people?

32. Help us save ourselves and our humanity and our planet from that thing’s dream.

33. Start by imagining different kinds of futures - more habitable futures. One that’s are less obviously extractive. One’s that are not just about obtaining more — data, money, influence, interactions, clicks. One’s that are less obviously undergirded by the same principles of extracting ‘efficiencies’. Or automating everything. Or kinking our behaviors. Or revolutionizing/disrupting/evading norms that are there because they undergird a functional social .

34. Imagining starts with the story we are told, or tell ourselves. It is entirely possible to craft futures stories that start to look and feel different, particularly with all of that exceptional creative talent, insight, vision, dreams.

35. Let’s tell stories that are undergirded by a different set of values. We can simply start with stories that look different — that is to say, not your typical future vision video.

36. Our purpose here at the Near Future Laboratory has always been to imagine more habitable near future worlds. And we mean that. Even future visions that show the world a little bit mundane, or a little bit bent, or a little bit normal, ordinary, everyday we find exceptionally helpful in opening up a sense of what we might accept and expect.

37. We’ve spent lots of time and a tank full of creative energy not just imagining possible near futures but educating ourselves and others as to how to imagine possible near futures. All this in an effort to get out of the rut our imaginations are caught in. To imagine better. To ‘imagine harder‘ as my pal Nick put it to me recently.

38. Get in touch. We want to help — we want to help you tell those stories about adjacent and other possible futures. We want to help us all start imagining different kinds of futures.

Some months back I was asked to consider a handful of ways of being that help me do what I do as a futures-facing designer, product innovator, and creative technologist. Here is what I offered in reponse.

1. Look at the world with wonder and amazement

Olympic gold medalist Dick Fosbury looked at the high jump bar a bit sideways. Imagine him cocking his head sideways, looking around at the other athletes training, and muttering, “Right, let’s try this one backwards…” And then, the Fosbury Flop came into being. How odd it must have seemed at the time, as odd as it would be today to see someone jump the high bar forwards, scissor-kick style. Look at the world with wonder and amazement at its potential to be what you see it as, especially if it is other than what is expected. Every so often, see the world like a Dick Fosbury. (That’s what it is to be a futures-oriented designer.)

1. This isn’t a review, but it is a recommendation, with a proposal.
2. A couple months back I caught the author Richard Powers on Ezra Klein’s podcast.
3. They were digging in to Powers’ recent book “Bewilderment”. I listened, not intimately familiar with Powers although a dear old friend had sent me a used, thrift store copy (sending books to friends! super fun!) of his “The Overstory” and I was in the midst of some deep work with my company which was fully consuming and so the book sat on the bedside stand unread and then there was the move to the other side of town and now it’s packed somewhere in storage. Somewhere.
4. Anyway.
5. The Ezra Klein / Richard Powers conversation.
6. Man oh man, did that resonate.
7. Eh? What do you mean by “that”? What was “that” that resonated?
8. Well, firstly there was Powers describing reflections on his relationship to Silicon Valley through his time going to dinner parties in Silicon Valley where every party had two baseline topics: real estate and life extension technologies.
9. I mean..that’d be a great SNL bit mostly because it sounds about how I’d imagine a dinner party discussion up there to be anchored.
10. And secondly, the wonderful way Powers reminds us of the beautifully complex imagination and consciousness of a child.
11. I wonder if we are compelled at some point, maybe around the start of high school, to lose our ability to embrace a full-body sense of amazement and wonder. Maybe when we’re told things like “act your age” or “stop playing and act serious” or driven to consider a reasonable path towards becoming a serious professional in order to get on the rails to a life of a very particular kind of prosperity, against other kinds of prosperity, like a life of exploring unexpected possibilities.
12. One of the central characters in “Bewilderment” is an astrobiologist who studies minuscule signals from other possible worlds. He takes his son on trips to these planets and we join along. Short passages that feel like they come out of nowhere take us to somewhere else, where what it is to live and thrive is just on the edge of our own quite grounded sense of possibility.
13. “Bewilderment” sticks with me, which I suppose is what makes Powers such a noted author. What strikes me, now several weeks after reading the book, is how it reminds me of the power of the child’s expansive imagination and the importance of holding on to that — to be able to see irreducibly and without diminishment, possibilities for other kinds of worlds and ways of being, right here at home, on this planet. (Not Mars.)
14. If there’s anything to our climate future we need it is the expansive imagination not only to “see” possibilities but to represent those possibilities. Right now, as near as I can tell, we see the end — or escapes to unlikely off-world colonies. Our somewhat collective imaginary consciousness of the near future is roughly cyberpunk. We need a new basis — a new set of imagery (quite literally) that can weave its way in the imaginations of the still expansive imaginations of today’s youth.
15. When I had a bit more of the child in me than I do now, I was fully taken by the imaginary of that moments stories and images and Saturday morning “shows” and the Trenton flea market where you could find second hand Xerox 820 motherboards and 8” floppy drives salvaged from the areas labs — Bell Labs, RCA, Princeton University, etc. Building a launching Estes model rockets. Kitbashing Revell models of airplanes to make little plastic spaceships. Building a real flying saucer out of a hunk of metal and some cardboard with Larry Greenberg.
16. These kinds of experiences and some unexpectedly and profoundly encouraging mentors and friends shaped what I believed in and what I thought was possible.
17. Today, I mean — what do I know except what I know — my instinct says we need those sorts of ways of seeing and imagining and shaping a sense of what could be, of possibility, for the young’ns. Perhaps less about flying saucers and model rockets and a computational future, and a bit more about hopeful climate futures. I don’t want to say we shouldn’t fetishize space travel but maybe we shouldn’t fetishize space travel?
18. A few or four weeks ago, we (the Near Future Laboratory community), in a 36 hour sprint to create a proposal to LACMA — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a fit of realization, we emphasized the possibility of public engagement (really engagement with kids) on two things: “how to imagine the future”, and “how to imagine hopeful climate futures.” (The proposal is as peculiar and weird as you might expect. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just characterizing it as such because it feels childlike rather than a Microsoft Office document. You can see if here:LACMA Climate Futures For Kids
19. (Parenthetically, we are looking for support for this project to create richer youthful imaginations – so if you have any ideas or are part of an organization or institution or fund that has an interest in facilitating the creation of better climate futures please do not hesitate to contact me directly.)
20. What I had to give up on in order to believe that a program like this would do any good, was to avoid looking for a Silicon Valley / Industrial “solution” to our current climate future prospects. You know — only hoping for some miracle technology or some start-up banking on the bank to be had. I’m not saying that isn’t cool or useful, but we didn’t do things like get to the moon because some very clever engineers and program managers managed to build a gigantic rocket engine. We got there because a vision was created and young imaginations were filled decades before. (cf “Space Force: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space” — Fred Scharmen podcast episode coming soon!)
21. What I had to embrace in order to believe that a program like this would do any good was to remind myself that the human imagination, particularly that of the youthful consciousness, is the best existential survival guide we’ve got.
22. All of that said, you can listen to a digest of General Seminar 17 “Solarpunk” that is indirectly related to this issue of the newsletter.
23. Also, the Near Future Laboratory Podcast Episode N°30 — a conversation with the eminent and remarkable Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne is out now. We touch on topics quite directly related to these here — the imagination, how to work with adjacent possibilities, the practice within industry and academic contexts. Etcetera.
24. It’s all related. Finding ways to imagine futures better, teaching ways of imagining (or “futuring” as my pal Scott Smith describes it), and making the imagination something that we all recognize we have and we all exercise vigorously.
25. Let’s get to work!

This is Issue 28 of the Design Fiction Newsletter and this is your commercial interruption.

Besides the Design Fiction Newsletter, I produce the Near Future Laboratory Podcast and by “produce” I mean I do just about everything to bring it to you and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it had some value.

If you find it of value too, I’d ask you to subscribe, rate, and support it. You can support this newsletter and the podcast over at Patreon.com. Such is a modest way of signaling that you find it of value and I genuinely appreciate that signal. (You can also offer me a cup of coffee!)

You’ll want to give a listen to the last episode in which Katie McCrory from IKEA breaks down the role that Design Fiction plays within the organization, and how we used Design Fiction to shape their annual Life at Home Report.

1. I was listening to a podcast with Neal Stephenson, who I guess is best pigeon-holed (because I’m certain he’s much much more) as quite a thoughtful, imaginative writer.
2. I think it was this podcast.
3. At one point in response to a question, Stephenson said that people are notoriously bad with statistics.
4. The first thing that popped into my head was agreement, and not just because fractions and math can be scary.
5. I think I felt that thought because futures boiled down statistical likelihoods with a number between 0.0 and 1.0 lack any kind of rich, fulsome, evocative acuity.
6. 0.0 - 1.1 doesn’t really activate the imagination to the point of feeling what it is to live within a possible future.
7. Stats don’t communicate experience quite as well as all the other mechanisms by which one can richly appreciate and excavate what it is to experience a possible world.
8. A day or two later, I listened to this episode of the same podcast. It was an interview with Philip Tetlock who’s, like..the “super forecaster” guy and who also gets introduced as “quite simply one of the world’s greatest social scientists.” (Ugh..I mean — nothing at all against Tetlock whatsoever..he seems like the kinda feller I could enjoy chatting with around the barbecue. It’s just frustrating that superlatives are used this way. They’re just not helpful. Maybe that’s just me..)
9. The episode was lousy with predictions, and rankings of great predictors, and insights on what makes a good predictor (and foxes.)
10. I’m not really into prediction. You know that if you’ve been following along.
11. Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road. It’s hard to explain. It feels a bit like the phenomenon where you tell yourself something enough times with enough conviction that you are challenged to imagine anything else. Also predictions feel transactional. Someone wants that prediction in order to make a proposition bet on something happening and all of a sudden, it’s not about imagining possibilities richly, it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means. I guess it means placing the right financial bet on a possible outcome and reaping the rewards thus.
12. (Parenthetically, I’m super into riding bikes, especially on rough trails and gravel. You learn to avoid looking too hard at bits of the trail you want to avoid — rocks, roots, ruts, snakes — because if you look too hard at those things you want to avoid, you almost always end up going right into them. It’s weird. In aviation they call a similar kind of phenomenon ‘get-there-itis’ where you are so fixated on getting to where you originally intended to go that you don’t recognize that everything’s changed — really bad weather, for example — and you should begin to imagine other outcomes, like diverting somewhere safe.)
13. I think doing and relying exclusively on predictions can lead to get-there-itis.
14. There’s got to be a corollary in other practices. Like..are we in get-there-itis when it comes to Web3? Crypto? VR and AR? Geoengineering? Going to Mars?
15. I once asked someone to help me imagine what it would be to live in the VR future and they told me to imagine lines of people wrapping around the block of Apple stores worldwide.
16. 🤷🏽‍♂️ Good start, but we can do better and I’m enjoying mentoring folks to imagine with a bit more depth. What’s the VR future as represented by the first thing you touch in the morning? Or the VR future in the context of an older model refrigerator, or underarm deodorant?
17. Given a set of statistics about possible outcomes of a sports match-up, episodic police procedural, spy thriller, or even a re-enactment of a historical event — it is likely you’d rather watch and experience the lived drama of things rather than just have an human-enhanced prediction algorithm tell you the likelihood of various outcomes.
18. (That’s the same as saying that the overwhelming majority of drama and/or sports fans would like to watch the action rather than just know the final score. It’s the setup of countless jokes, if you need proof. You know the one — main character missed watching the game live and implores supporting actors to keep mum about who won and inevitably someone does accidentally and you know — cue laugh track.)
19. I’m way more of a visual and tangible imagineer. I need to create, see, or tangibly handle a vision of some near future in order to consider, ponder, discuss that near future world. Let’s make a possible world with a high level of acuity, even and particularly if it that possible world runs counter to intuition. Dive into it. So much more fun. Let’s paint an evocative, provocative, curious world of possibilities, showing multiple possible outcomes rather than declaring winners.
20. And in that imaginative exercise, we learn to think through possibilities.
21. That’s the Design Fiction approach.
22. Just the facts - or just the stats - is simply too banal for me.
23. It leaves no room for actively engaging in outcomes, allowing the imagination to go big the way a really good story is able to do.
24. Statistics might be useful when bets are being placed on possible near future worlds. When one doesn’t care about the lived experiences of that world except insofar as one is attempting to place (typically financial) bets on outcomes.
25. And they might even be useful if they went along with a rich imaginary of that world that wasn’t just numbers, and wasn’t just prose analysis — but also with a visual story, like a photo book or picture postcards that came from that world, or some materialized souvenirs brought back from the imagination’s adventure in that world. And then, next to all of that material, there you can put your number between 0.0 - 1.0, along with a Yelp review and 5 star rating.
26. This is why we developed and evolved Design Fiction as a way of imagining possibility with rich acuity, rather than just predicting what will come next.
27. We really need to take our imaginations to the gym. Give them a good workout..develop a solid daily exercise regimen.
28. Got futures you need help imagining? It’s what I do. Get in touch.

1. For the longest time ever, the wheel has been rolling ‘round.
2. Perhaps for longer than the wheel has been around, humans have lugged around their stuff.
3. Going from one dwelling to another, whether to set out Kerouc-style to “find one’s fortune” out west, or just take a vacation, we’ve boxed up our belongings and brought them with us.
4. We’ve lugged stuff around. I guess that’s why we call those box-like things into which we’ve tossed them “luggage”, yeah?
5. I guess..
6. And what continues to amaze me or maybe now it’s just at the point of being a useful object lesson to deploy from time to time, is how long it took for that wheel and that luggage to come together and become the nearly ubiquitous “wheels on luggage.”
7. It’s truly worth remarking on, particularly because it seems so obvious in hindsight that the two things belonged together.
8. But, like..do we really get why it took so long to put wheels on luggage? I mean..it wasn’t until the 80s by some reckonings that the resistance to it sorta..broke through and started its trajectory towards cultural ubiquity.
9. All sorts of fascinating reasons and anecdotal case studies describe the reluctance and the necessary conditions. Things like affordable commercial airline travel, or even the ubiquity of leisure travel would be necessary.
10. But I’m less interested in the business case study type of thing.
11. I’m more interested in how one can set out to do something that today seems so incredibly obvious, but was also once ridiculous and nonsense.
12. By some accounts, it was an artist named Alfred Krupa who slapped wheels on luggage, presumably to cart around his art supplies.
13. Of course if you know me, I’m much less interested in the question of who/what was first to do what and when.
14. I want to appreciate and learn how to foster a highly intuitive, productively creative consciousness that can look at the world a bit askew, luxuriate in the nonsense seen, and find the paths that lead thence to beautiful, unanticipated, unexpected outcomes.
15. How can we foster an imagination of that sort? One that would put wheels on luggage?
16. “Get those wheels off of that luggage Krupa. Act your age, for goodness’ sake..”
17. Some types of psyches can’t help but turn some peculiar vision of nonsense into something meaningful. The intuition leads. The rational waits patiently — or maybe tortures the intuition, goading it to make some sense.
18. It’s not surprising to me that someone with the consciousness of an artist — high intuitive, willing to do something ‘zany’ (i.e. unanticipated, unexpected, startling, peculiar, odd, different, etc) may have been suited to doing something as crazy as putting wheels on luggage at a time when such was not done.
19. To resist rational, reasonable, sensical norms, well — that’s hard. It hurts. There are any number of land mines along the way.
20. Risking lack of acceptance — of ideas, the fruits of one’s intuition and imagination. That can hurt.
21. Vulnerability. Sharing an intuition or imagination is never risk-free and can lead to all kinds of nastiness.
22. Fear of, or the invocation of embarrassment, can take someone fully out of the creative game.
23. Embrace the wheels finding their luggage. Let your imagination — your intuition — lead you unexpected places.
24. Your intuition and imagination are showing you in their own peculiar, unstructured, psychedelic way what wheels on luggage feels like, which is different from all the other rational decision-making criteria that are otherwise fetishized by the step-wise procedures for design and creativity.
25. Learn how to attach yourself to that imagination.
26. Exercise it.
27. Become friends with it.
28. Give it a place, and a time to chase a ball and play.
29. Don’t reason with it. Don’t rationalize it.
30. Build. Create. Explore.
31. Make worlds that make sense to themselves, and forget for that play time if they make sense otherwise.
32. Ignore your imagination and your creative soul will be put in peril.
33. Our imagination is how we create new possible near future worlds.

1. I once heard — so it’s hearsay and anecdotal, but maybe useful as a provocation — that one of the unique qualities of human consciousness is an ability to imagine as if things were otherwise, or other than things are. That is, we have a unique ability to imagine change.

2. Is that true? Is it unique? Or is it hubris, because a human is likely the agent that said, or wrote such a thing? It certainly is self-satisfying to imagine that we’re a species, and uniquely advantaged over all the other species.

3. But, does it even matter as to its truthiness? Maybe it’s just helpful, but not so much as a point of argumentation, but more as a provocation to ourselves. An opportunity to do something special, perhaps world-changing. Perhaps world-saving.

1. It’s been a minute.

1. I heard the most simple and resonant description of integrity the other day.

Hoagie at the helm of Blue Boat. Adrian in his beach lounger.

1. I’ve been told that the reason someone will do something without being paid with, you know — dollars and stuff, or some other sanctioned fiat currency — is because they themselves receive some kind of ‘psychic payout.’ When we’re paid to do something the traditional way, we feel recognition that we are valued enough that someone is going to exchange some “folding money” (as my dad used to call it) for a commitment of our time, intellect, creativity, muscle power, etc. The higher one is paid in folding money, the more we are signaled that we are valued. The more we are valued, the more we are meant to be content to do the job.

For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization] as an alternative to venture capital dims the light of its much more profound, and much more interesting potential — a fluid, programmable, modular social network that is by design global, transparent, and collaborative. DAO has the potential to become a new frontier of belonging, to create a new species of collective characterized by the alienation of trust from the ownership and control. Calvino, who in his dreams manifest a desire to “possess” a version of NYC, can extend such private desire to a more tangible contribution. DAOs can become a meta-layer on top of the idea exchanges of the world — a second home for those eager to make strides towards their goals, and know that the way to get there is not by oneself, but in a collective.

It’s helpful to consider that much (all?) of what we know about the world comes from observation. It’s been said that we are sense-making critters. Our brains are able to take inputs, make meaning, and take action with the aid of opposable thumbs. We observe, interpret, act.

Despite the 90s VHS-tinged title art of my beloved ‘X-Files’, if there is any truth out there, it is on us to determine what it means through observation, discussion, debate, disagreement, and, for better or worse the inevitable and occasional fisticuffs. (Is it that fist fights or worse break out when beliefs in what is true and right are challenged?)

James Bridle wrote a remarkable essay some years back called “The New Aesthetic.”

1. The whole NFT thing? It’s like standing between different worlds.

1. Somewhere in Holland in the mid-17th century, a time machine was invented. Or it may have been a teleportation device. This is how it happened.

As I see it, there are two unspoken principles undergirding work to create better, more habitable near future worlds.

“You don’t go to [Shakespeare’s] Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland. You go to Macbeth to learn what a man feels like to have gained a kingdom and lost his soul.”

One - What Happens In Vagueness, Stays In Vagueness

The delicious gooey center of Design Fiction is what you get when you take on a mindset such that the work of doing Design Fiction is not external to the possible outcomes. In other words, you’re not collecting a bunch of inputs and cobbling them into some vague, not-fun-to-read package of some sort — a PowerPoint or summary report. One significant objective of Design Fiction is to translate insights and such into some form or archetype and to do so with an exceptionally high level of verisimilitude and acuity.

Design Fiction or Science Fiction?

In most instances I can think of, science fiction is more than simple dramatic storytelling about the future. It is often allegory through which the present state is refracted back to us — an assessment of who we are as individuals and as larger social formations. It’s a step removed from direct reflection as one might find in essays about our present day culture, politics, daily life and so forth.

A Cornell Box I Made Out Of Algorithms

I’ll keep things brief this week as my brain is all filled up with reading our manuscript and I already begged our lovely whip-cracker crackerjack editorial shepherds with a three day extension to final-final stuff and they’d probably look at me with wonderment that I wrote 3000 words for a newsletter but somehow couldn’t find time to read and wordsmith the . (There. I cleverly and surreptitiously settled the ‘what’s the title’ discussion.) Definitely a sideways-eye-narrowing emoji should go here, on behalf of my friends and colleagues working on the project.

But before that, I want to mention that Nick presented the closing keynote at the IKEA Digital Days conference last week from his studio in Oakland. He spoke about setting the right conditions for creating grounded and actionable design futures. Design Fiction, (as you know) can play a huge part in that, and Nick explains how it fits in a broader corporate approach. It’s got a modest 30 minutes runtime — which is just long enough to watch whist luxuriating in your chaise, consuming a proper hand-held sandwich.

And-also I want to mention that in this recent newsletter I mentioned the work of Professor David Kirby and his important book “Lab Coats in Hollywood”. Through exquisite timing, is a conversation with David, which I would encourage you to listen to as it ties things together and you can hear about the diegetic prototype straight from him!

This week was a bit of a highly generative and exciting few or four days here at the Near Future Laboratory’s Distributed Global Headquarters. You see, there were some diverts and distractions, the most exciting of which is we have the nearly final draft of The Manual of Design Fiction in our networked hands. (And sign up on that link there to get on the special list!)

A Design Fiction Breakdown

There’s a wonderful Design Fictional moment, done with a kind of subtlety and incisiveness that implicates the residue of a possible episteme in which the Algorithm is the central mechanism of our relationship to the world, and to ourselves.

Rewind to Westworld, Season 3, Episode 01 at around 43:50.

“In The Matter of Everalbum and Paravision”

1. The Issue

Q? Or The Algorithm?

1. Fear and Despair

In the film ‘Bird Box’, based on the book of the same name, humans are driven to such a degree of despair that they take their own lives when they see the shadow of their consciousness — the thing they most fear. They may even take a few people down with them along their path of self-destruction. The transformation to homicide-suicide is stark, to put it mildly — and one of the more frightening things I’ve seen on screen without just seeing a more typical, gooey, slimey monster show up on screen.

Heeeyaaa-Zing-Paapowww!

1. Fiction’s Critical Function

Fiction serves a critical function, which is to reflect the experiences of living in a world as if we were a part of that world. Fiction models life like a kind of simulation of possibilities, compelling us to consider, reflect, surmise, and inhabit. We immerse ourselves, to varying degrees depending on our affinity and interest in the fiction, in these fictional worlds and those worlds submerge themselves, sometimes quite completely, in our consciousness.

The Fosbury Flop and the power of unanticipated, optimistically contrarian perspectives to make creative work “creative” in the sense of genuinely audacious, distinctive, and worthy of double-takes. The story goes that Dick Fosbury looked at the high jump from a different perspective. He had the audacity to jump differently - backwards, appropriately enough — rather than the front-facing scissor kick, which now looks quite awkward and ungainly. The shift from a previously accepted normal to a farm-fresh and new way of seeing, making sense of, and being in the world often has this effect, when we stop and wonder — “What took them so long to put wheels on luggage, anyway?”

One - The Nikon F vs The Telephone

A blind spot in modern user-centered design is the difficulty in handling the ‘unintended use case’.

One: Consider the Diegetic Prototype

What was that box of breakfast cereal doing in Minority Report, anyway? A sci-fi film set in the future? And breakfast cereal?

One - The Future As An Email Attachment

Have you ever gotten one of these emails? Where the future is zipped up into a PowerPoint deck and then sent around in an email with the expectation that the recipients will open and read it and then become excited about what they see?