As the name of our Laboratory implies, we’re very interested in the hands-on, pragmatic ways in which one can imagine and then create things from and for the near future. In that sense, we design products and the like. Stuff. We make stuff. They are just things from and for the near future. Which shouldn’t be a problem. They just need to be designed with care and a sensitivity to what futures we expect or would like. Then the opportunities for that stuff is revealed.<\/p>\n
Over the years we’ve developed an approach and a sensibility for thinking about the near future. It’s an approach that is object-based in that we make things \u2014\u00a0call them products, sometimes software, sometimes other kinds of wares. It’s a sensibility that is infused with the quotidian and everyday almost to the point of the mundane, because ultimately everything trends towards that and things seem more real and “read” easier when they simply exist without fanfare and hype. And always our approach is provocative, as in provoking conversations and stories and drama about the near future.<\/p>\n
A few months ago, I asked a small group of friends to meet me and my Laboratory cohort in Detroit at the beginning of October. I wanted time together with friends<\/a> whose work shares something with the Laboratory’s way of making and thinking. I wanted time to be less yammer-y and more hammer-y. The goal was to participate in a three day workshop. We were to make something and Detroit seemed like an apropos place to make a future thing that is more everyday than the future imagined in Palo Alto. Plus, it’s about midway between Los Angeles and London, more or less and I wanted to make it easy for friends from other parts to come, on their own dime, and do some work.<\/p>\n The work of the workshop was to make a Design Fiction product catalog using all the principles, approaches, tools and work kits that the Laboratory has gathered together over the years.<\/p>\n A bit of background, then.<\/p>\n When I first looked seriously at how science fiction shapes and informs the way we think about technology<\/a>, it did not occur to me that one could do<\/em> science fiction. Rather, one received it as packaged \u2014\u00a0in a book, a film, comic, a television series, etc.<\/p>\n Of course, I’d come to understand differently. When I wrote my dissertation and in subsequent projects, I came to realize that telling stories can happen in many ways besides novels and films. Objects can be evocative of stories \u2014\u00a0props and prototypes that our imagination begins to fill in with their reason for existing, their operation, their role.<\/p>\n In what I see as an addendum to that earlier work, pre-21st century work, I discussed the possibility that there’s a space for design-technology in between science fact and science fiction. The emphasis on technology-informed design is deliberate and its more a reflection of my own engineering background and interests than an attempt to cordon off other significant facets of design.<\/p>\n Design-technology makes sense in the idioms of science fact and science fiction so \u2014\u00a0here it is: Design Fiction is the deliberate and purposeful act of doing fiction through design. It’s telling stories by making things<\/em> up, with an emphasis on “things” and their making.<\/p>\n So, this is what we did. With gracious support from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design<\/a> we all gathered together for a quite intensive three days of making things up. The brief was simple: make up a product catalog from the near future.<\/strong><\/p>\n