Yesterday I got to attend and document the Ethnography + Design fiction workshop Superflux was running at the EPIC 2013 conference. Held at the gorgeous Royal Institute (ancient books and weird artefacts everywhere!), the workshop was all about using ethnography to create a fictional narrative for design. So you make up a story given a few variables, envisioning how the future might look and how you might design for such a future. Design fiction is apparently all the rage these days, and my uni course certainly puts a lot of emphasis on using fiction to situate our work. In a sense, we are always designing for the future, whether it's 5 minutes, 5 weeks, or 5 years from now. Design is always fiction, at least up until the moment your design becomes a material reality, and even then the boundaries are unclear. At any rate it's hard to argue that ethnography does matter to design, because in order to know what we are designing, we need to know who and what we are designing for. In a weird way design is as much a social study as it is an art.
It was definitely intriguing being a fly on the wall during such a saturated exchange of ideas between university professors, anthropologists, speculative designers and fortune 500 company researchers. Some of the snippets of conversation I picked up raised some great questions about the future of humankind – particularly about our resource consumption and imminent climate crisis. For example one of the groups discussed a growing speculation about water becoming completely commercialised. Could clean water be the new oil? What would happen if corporate companies suddenly had total control over the amount of water that was dispensed to an entire population? How would the domestic architecture of society change, from our eating habits to the tools we use?
Interesting stuff.
It was definitely intriguing being a fly on the wall during such a saturated exchange of ideas between university professors, anthropologists, speculative designers and fortune 500 company researchers. Some of the snippets of conversation I picked up raised some great questions about the future of humankind – particularly about our resource consumption and imminent climate crisis. For example one of the groups discussed a growing speculation about water becoming completely commercialised. Could clean water be the new oil? What would happen if corporate companies suddenly had total control over the amount of water that was dispensed to an entire population? How would the domestic architecture of society change, from our eating habits to the tools we use?
Interesting stuff.
