This week, high on the list of things to look forward to (definitely well-above my appointment with my accountant, nice as she is..) is O’Reilly Etech. I’m glad to be going this year, after missing it entirely last year.
I’ll be talking on Thursday March 12 at 11:55am in the Imperial Ballroom, immediately after the Senate has their deliberations on whether or not to leave a garrison in Cloud City.
My topic? Design Fiction. Hopefully the essay that attaches to this thinking will be done in a matter of a few dozen hours. We’ll see. Had quite my share of Tawny Port last night and I don’t write particularly well when juiced like Hemingway or, whatever..Joyce or something.
Design is a kind of authoring practice, crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material to create social objects and experiences can be seen as a kind of practice close to writing fiction. This is a presentation about the relationship between design, science fiction, and the material elements that help tell visual stories about the future — mostly props and special effects.
The questions here are this:
How does design participate in shaping possible near future worlds?
How does the integration of story telling, technology, art, and design provide opportunities to re-imagine how the world may be in the future?