Last week I participated in the Ethnography + Design Fiction workshop with Superflux at the EPIC 2013 conference. The workshop aimed to introduce the potential of speculation to create fictional narratives. By ethnographically sculpting stories about people and their behaviour within changing contexts, we can begin to unearth new possibilities and new questions about our current reality. If ethnography is the study and description of people and communities, and design is the materialisation of ideas that are situated within these communities, then surely ethnography should be inextricably linked to design as a natural instrument and informant. Design fiction, in which we narrate imaginary people using imaginary things in imaginary situations, then becomes a form of fabricated ethnography, forcing us to speculate and ponder on the vast realm of what if possibilities. It’s a way to throw out the constraints of what is or isn’t deemed “realistic” by marketers or engineers and consider alternate realities in order to reconsider the present. Design fiction is a way of prototyping new experiences that propose absurdities and innovations that go beyond the conventional, uncritical ideas that are favoured by the tired regimes of “faster” and “cheaper.” It allows us to contemplate ideas that are free from the assumptions that often become burdens on our imaginations.
Designers work in a perpetual state of fiction anyway, as they invent for a world and a set of conditions that are yet to exist, constantly looking to the future context in which their designs will sit (whether that is five minutes or five years from the present). So at a fundamental level, design fiction simply allows us to perform “low cost experimentation compared to trying things for real.” [Dennis Dutton]. But the truly significant element of fictional ethnography is its focus on design as a people-centered practice, encouraging proposals that pose much more poignant questions about how design can affect communities and cultures, infiltrating traditionally impenetrable establishments like healthcare and government.
It is not, however, a way of attempting to predict the actual future. Rather, design fiction acknowledges that there is a multitude of possible futures, each of which harbour their own scenarios of potential. And by fantasizing about people, communities, practices, rituals, products and services, we can begin to understand the boundaries of these varying futures, and become much better equipped to tackle some of the unintended consequences that may arise from them. It is not the tediously uninspired linear process of reaching point B from point A, but rather a fluid medium within which designers can reflect as well as actively make. “The best work always treats design and ethnography as complementary activities that are done in an iterative fashion that actually makes them difficult to separate in the end.” [Anne Galloway]
Nonetheless it seems there is still some discrepancy between the potential design fiction unleashes and the actual social movements it's been affecting. Outside the simple context of an exhibition, where the narrative is presented for brief contemplation and discussion, who is the correct audience to engage in these types of projects? Who should be viewing these speculative visions of the world, and how should they respond? [Nicolas Nova]
