Modelling design fiction:what’s the story?

This paper is intended to be read alongside the design fiction film Heating Britain’s Homes. It uses the film to explore questions relating to the methods employed when creating a design fiction. Design fictions are “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change” by employing a “conflation of design, science fact, and science fiction”. Design fictions do not aim to present or develop ‘finished’ designs, but rather they use design methods to “create a discursive space within which new forms of cultural artefact might emerge” . As a design fiction piece, the ‘discursive space’ that this film addresses relates to disruptive possibilities associated with cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin. However, for the purposes of this paper the film and its concern with cryptographic currency are secondary and subservient to a discussion of design fiction practice itself. A three- layered model of design fiction is proposed as a communication device to help contextualise the various ideas used in the film, and as a tool to be applied in the creation, and analysis, of design fiction more generically. The paper concludes by positing questions with a view to taking steps towards formal design fiction methods

Back to the future:10 years of design fiction

The term design fiction was originally coined in 2005 by the Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling. In the 10 years since, design fiction has received considerable interest from a range disciplines most notably HCI which increasingly draws upon generative methods and creative practices. In this paper we consider examples of recent HCI research that refers to design fiction in order to highlight commonalities and ambiguities in how the term is interpreted and used. We argue that design fiction is a compelling and powerful concept but is inherently ambiguous. We therefore suggest strategies to disambiguate communications ‘about design fiction’ in order to strengthen applications ‘of design fiction’

Game of drones

In response to the recent European Directive the UK government sanctioned the use of drones by commercial providers subject to pilots holding an approved Drone Pilot Proficiency Certificate (DPPC). As the government anticipated the main use has been in providing services to local authorities that aid in the enforcement of local by-laws. Whilst many commercial providers have followed the traditional path of employing dedicated enforcement officers to pilot the drones, in this paper we present on-going research that ‘gamifies’ the enforcment activities to allow members of the local community to act as enforcement officers. In particular we have worked with retired members of the police and armed services as drone pilots in relation to the enforcement of by-laws relating to parking offences and dog fouling in a small UK city. The initial results indicate that not only does this age group find the game-like activity enjoyable they feel that they are providing an important service to their community

Pushing the limits of design fiction:the case for fictional research papers

This paper considers how design fictions in the form of ‘imaginary abstracts’ can be extended into complete ‘fictional papers’. Imaginary abstracts are a type of design fiction that are usually included within the content of ‘real’ research papers, they comprise brief accounts of fictional problem frames, prototypes, user studies and findings. Design fiction abstracts have been proposed as a means to move beyond solutionism to explore the potential societal value and consequences of new HCI concepts. In this paper we contrast the properties of imaginary abstracts, with the properties of a published paper that presents fictional research, Game of Drones. Extending the notion of imaginary abstracts so that rather than including fictional abstracts within a ‘non-fiction’ research paper, Game of Drones is fiction from start to finish (except for the concluding paragraph where the fictional nature of the paper is revealed). In this paper we review the scope of design fiction in HCI research before contrasting the properties of imaginary abstracts with the properties of our example fictional research paper. We argue that there are clear merits and weaknesses to both approaches, but when used tactfully and carefully fictional research papers may further empower HCI’s burgeoning design discourse with compelling new methods

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

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