Design fiction:anticipating adoption

When we submitted our work in progress (WiP) paper, “Game of Drones,”1 to the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) in 2015, we had no idea whether we’d be derided or praised. The paper presented a fictional account of the Game of Drones research project, which never actually happened. While it might be surprising to some that such a paper passed review and was accepted, it’s important to understand that the intent behind the paper wasn’t subversive; rather, we wanted to produce new knowledge. The purpose of the Game of Drones project was dual to explore a potential future use of drones for civic enforcement activities and advance a program for developing design fiction as a research method. Here, we highlight the enormous potential of design fiction by covering both how drones helped us develop a design fiction, and how design fiction helped us highlight wider issues related to the design of a drone-based system

Vapourworlds and design fiction:the role of intentionality

There is a long tradition of designers creating visions of technological futures. We contrast the properties of two related types of future envisionment, whose commonality is using ‘world building’ to showcase or prototype technological concepts. We consider commercial visions that depict potential future products within possible future worlds, and by extending the concept of Vapourware we term these ‘Vapourworlds’. We contrast Vapourworlds with Design Fictions, a class of envisionment that inherits qualities of criticality and exploration from its familial antecedents’ radical design and critical design. By comparing these two approaches we intend to shed light on both. Superficially these world building endeavours appear similar, yet under the surface an underlying difference in intentionality permeates the substance of both practices. We conclude with a position that by highlighting the contrasts between these practices, mutually beneficial insights become apparent

On the Internet Everybody Knows You’re a Whatchamacallit (or a Thing)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is fed by, and feeds into, flowing data streams. Through these flows, servers, sensors, humans and alike are networked together, data and networks mediating between physical and digital realms. ‘Things’ of all types, toys, lights and kettles, are tangible. On-view-but-unheard, they do their jobs. All the while, in the unseen digital domain, data flow, gush, and bubble, for the most part imperceptible to the human contingent of the allencompassing menagerie of stuff. Here in the kingdom of TCP/IP, the atmosphere is thick, packets of intermachine chatter commute back and forth around the network stacks, a tidal race of datagrams pulsate, whilst somewhere - far away? - a 2D image is painted on a 3D screen. ‘Connected!’ Chirps the dialog box. The poetic tension betwixt an apparent calm in the physical world, and an obscured complexity in the digital otherworld, sets the scene for the argument we present in this paper: The IoT’s objects, entities, or stuff makes up constellations; Human Centered Design methods are constrained by IoT constellations’ complexity and multiplicity; by building from Object Orientated Ontology, IoT designers may cast multiple data, devices, corporations, and humans as equally significant ‘actants’ in a flat ontology. Here we pose this argument and propose ways to explore it

Game vaporware as design fictions

In this research we examine games, and games hardware, that can be classed as ‘Vaporware’. More specifically software that was never written, or hardware that was never built, and consequently no one ever played. In particular we are considering such vaporware as examples of ‘Design Fiction’ as they once represented speculative visions of the future based on emerging technology. Vaporware is a term generally used to describe products that are announced to the general public but are never actually manufactured. Whereas design fiction is a term used to describe plausible ‘diegetic prototypes’ that are built, or suggested, to create an opportunity for discourse about possible technological futures. Whilst it could be argued vaporware games are simply failed products that were justifiably scrapped before joining the long lists of come-to-nothing games and consoles, by reviewing examples we offer an alternative view that they can serve as objects of discourse for exposing the potential futures of video games and thus could be considered in terms of design fiction. To add further weight to the argument that games can be useful as design fictions we then consider “Game of Drones”, an example of a design fiction that pivots around a game element, to illustrate how the deliberate use of design fiction can stimulate discourse around game futures (in this case the growing promotion of ‘gamified’ services as means of engaging users). Whilst the notion of designing games that will never be built may seem paradoxical in relation to the Games industry’s predominantly commercial aims, we believe that the deliberate adoption of design fiction as a practice within game design would facilitate the emergence of meaningful discussions around future gaming without the frustrations induced by vaporware

A thesis about design fiction

This research began as something else. Originally, I sought to research the possible futures of cryptographic currencies, and I encountered Design Fiction for the first time when assembling a methodology for that project. I was enticed by the rhetoric around Design Fiction and the aesthetic of works describing themselves as Design Fiction. However, as I researched the concept more thoroughly it quickly became apparent that grounding an entire doctoral thesis on Design Fiction alone may be problematic due to a lack of consensus around what Design Fiction really is and how it works. Hence, my doctorate pivoted, and rather than using Design Fiction to research another topic, I elected to research Design Fiction itself. Through desk-based research into Design Fiction the thesis establishes that while there are some central notions which seem common to Design Fictions (e.g. a concern with ‘the future’, the use of ‘design’, and a flavour of unreality invoked by the term ‘fiction’) there is little consensus around how these notions should be defined, how they interact with each other, and what—in concrete terms—the nature of the practice that emerges in the space between them really is. Responding to the apparent lack of consensus the thesis explores the following questions: • What is Design Fiction? • What can Design Fiction do? • What are the best ways to achieve that? In order to explore such fundamental conundrums—and guided by Bruce Sterling’s succinct assertion that ‘the best way to understand the many difficulties of design fiction is to attempt to create one’—my responses to these questions were developed using a Research through Design methodology to inform a series of ‘material engagements’ with Design Fiction. These are articulated through a series of ‘case studies’. Each case study uses Design Fiction to explore a different technology or context. These include cryptographic currency, robotic carers, drones, and artificial intelligence. Together the studies create a portfolio of material engagements with Design Fiction that, collectively, underpin contingent responses to the research questions. The thesis concludes that Design Fiction is a type of ‘World Building’ that may be utilised in many different ways, for example as a communication tool, as an ideation aid, or as a research method. Furthermore, the underlying intentionality of any given Design Fiction must be expressed through appropriate media in order to support World Building that is sensitive to both the given domain’s attributes and the factors motivating the use of Design Fiction in the first place. While the Research through Design approach applied in this research aspires only to produce contingent and temporary answers to the research questions, those answers come together as a set of usable and accessible insights useful for unravelling, understanding, utilising Design Fiction, while fostering the practice’s ongoing maturation and adoption into its own near future

Implications for Adoption

In this paper we explore the motivations for, and practicalities of, incorporating ‘implications for adoption’ into HCI research practice. Implications for adoption are speculations which may be used in research projects to scrutinize and explore the implications and requirements associated with a technology’s potential adoption in the future. There is a rich tradition within the HCI community of implementing, demonstrating, and testing new interactions or technologies by building prototypes. User-centered design methods help us to develop prototypes to and move toward designs that are validated, efficient, and rewarding to use. However, these studies rarely shift their temporal focus to consider, in any significant detail, what it would mean for a technology to exist beyond its prototypical implementation, in other words how these prototypes might ultimately be adopted. Given the CHI community’s increasing interest in technology-related human and social effects, the lack of attention paid to adoption represents a significant and relevant gap in current practices. It is this gap that the paper addresses and in doing so offers three contributions: (1) exploring and unpacking different notions of adoption from varying disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing why considering adoption is relevant and useful, specifically in HCI research; (3) discussing methods for addressing this need, specifically design fiction, and understanding how utilizing these methods may provide researchers with means to better understand the myriad of nuanced, situated, and technologically-mediated relationships that innovative designs facilitate

Not On Demand:Internet of Things Enabled Energy Temporality

Over a century ago alternating current (AC) triumphed over direct current (DC) in the ‘war of the currents’ and ever since AC has been ubiquitous. Increasingly devices operating internally use DC power, hence inefficient conversions from AC to DC are necessarily common. Conversely, domestic photovoltaic (PV) panels produce DC current which must be inverted to AC to integrate with existing wiring, appliances, and/or be exported the power grid. By using batteries, specifically designed DC devices, and the Internet of Things, our infrastructure may be redesigned to improve efficiency. In this provocation, we use design fiction to describe how such a system could be implemented and to open a discussion about the broader implications of such a technological shift on user experience design and interaction design

Why the internet of things needs object orientated ontology

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of connected devices with inputs and outputs operating in, and on, the physical world. The network is simultaneously fed by, and feeds into, data streams flowing across digital-physical boundaries, connecting sensors, servers, actuators, devices, and people. ‘Things’ of all types, lightbulbs, doorbells, kettles and cars, discretely-but-visibly do their jobs. Meanwhile in the unseen digital domain, where data swirls imperceptible to humans, the atmosphere is thick with the rapidly-moving data packets and content that constitute inter-machine chatter. Contrasting the visible calm in the physical world with obscured bedlam in the digital otherworld sets the scene for the argument we present in this paper. Applying Object Orientated Ontology, IoT designers may reimagine data, devices, and users, as equally significant actants in a flat ontology. In this paper, we exemplify our arguments by creating a Design Fiction around a reimagined ‘smart kettle’

Design fiction as world building

Design Fiction has garnered considerable attention during recent years yet still remains pre-paradigmatic. Put differently there are concurrent,but incongruent, perspectives on what Design Fiction is and how to use it. Acknowledging this immaturity, we assert that the best way to contribute to the establishment of an evidence-based first paradigm, is by adopting a research through design approach. Thus, in this paper we describe ‘research into design fiction, done through design fiction’. This paper describes the creation of two Design Fictions through which we consider the relationship between narrative and Design Fiction and argue that links between the two are often drawn erroneously. We posit that Design Fiction is in fact a ‘world building’ activity, with no inherent link to ‘narrative’ or ‘storytelling’. The first Design Fiction explores a near future world containing a system for gamified drone-based civic enforcement and the second is based on a distant future in which hardware and algorithms capable of detecting empathy are used as part of everyday communications. By arguing it is world building, we aim to contribute towards the disambiguation of current Design Fiction discourse and the promotion of genre conventions, and, in doing so to reinforce the foundations upon which a first stable paradigm can be constructed

More-Than Human Centred Design:Considering Other Things

This paper responds to contemporary design contexts that frequently contain complex interdependencies of human and non-human actants. To adequately represent these perspectives requires a shift towards More-Than Human Centred Design. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one context that demonstrates this need. The 'things' within such networks transcend their physical forms and extend to include algorithms, humans, data, business models, etc. and each imports independent-but-interdependent motivations and perspectives. Therefore, we use the IoT to clarify our proposition and to convey our three contributions. First, we review the expanding corpus of contemporary Human-Computer Interaction research that seeks to expand the notion of Human Centred Design by moving beyond the dominant anthropocentric perspective. Second, we introduce a novel design metaphor, 'constellations', which allows both the interdependencies and independent perspectives to be considered. Third, we provide an account of a speculative design to demonstrate how it may be put into practice