‘To both design and politics, futures affords some tools to crack open times-to-come as a far richer domain for discussion. It also offers the holistic systems-thinking and temporal reach that are necessary to move beyond ideology-driven argumentation about ‘the (singular) future’ into more systematic and multi-dimensional exploration. Politics, in its theoretical aspect, gives futurists and designers a sensitivity to power relations and a range of conceptions of the good and the just at the social level, and in its activist aspect, represents a tradition of exploring and concretely operationalising these ethics in the world. Designers give to futures and politics practitioners a much-needed dose of communications acumen and facility with media, along with a fusion of aesthetic (used here in the narrow sense) with the pragmatic; a necessary equilibrium between form and function.’

— Stuart Candy, ‘The Futures of Everyday Life‘ (2010)

Notes, annotations, links:

• My answer to the question, ‘What was it like to play Superstruct’?

• Our essay on ‘design futurescaping’ in Blowup: The Era of Objects

• Stuart Candy’s PhD thesis, ‘The Futures of Everyday Life‘

• Kevin Kelly on Scenius

• The London Hackspace

• Robin Sloan’s ‘Kanye West, Media Cyborg‘

• More on the hungry radio

• Thomas Thwaites’ Policing Genes

• Protei

• Cesar Harada at TEDxMidAtlantic

• Superflux’s write-up of ‘Pirates of the Danube’

• ‘Pirates of the Danube’ project outcomes

• Julijonas Urbonas’ website

• ‘Song of the Machine‘

• The Dremelfuge

• Jamais Cascio on ‘Legacy Futures’

• Neal Stephenson on the failures of innovation

• Bruce Sterling on our temporal horizons

photo credit: David Boyle

Disclaimer: I’m not a designer, I just work with them.

Bruce Sterling (2009):

When science fiction was born from its radio-parts catalogs, design was also born as the streamlined handmaiden of industry. (…) But these two sister disciplines, born within the same decade and surely for similar reasons, soon parted ways. The sisters were distantly cordial; but they saw no common purpose.
Design, which is industrial, has clients and consumers, while science fiction, an art form, has patrons and an audience.

An ethics of design fiction?

I asked the question, and Adam answered with something that triggered a deep, visceral unease, for reasons I found hard to qualify.

~ not so much that he missed the point, as that he missed my point, hitting back with a diatribe on the complicity of design fiction in consumerism, as an annexation of fiction by corporate R&D and, more sweepingly, the market …

Not untrue, whatever my issues with his argument. At its least objectionable, we can see this tendency in Intel’s Morrow Project, and the strange feedback loops between Minority Report and the Kinect.

Whatever else it may be, design fiction is propositional.

So, is there room for a propositional ethics of design fiction?

Turning our eye to the role of design under conditions of post-Fordism, collapsonomics. The role of design outside the market. The role of design in foresight, and of foresight in design.

Scott Smith (2011):

A common characteristic of these creators is a facility to take a nascent technological capability and bend it around a moral, ethical or social issue, intentionally or as by-product, and thereby provide a useful thinking space to model implications and consequences. They continually ask questions about what it means to attempt to put emotion into technology, and by doing this, they create and explore hundreds of mini-scenarios of a human-technological future. Whether you agree or disagree with particular views of how these futures may unfold, the questions need asking, if only to provide a better sense of the direction(s) we wish to pursue.

‘Be the change you can, and simulate the rest’ (Stuart Candy, 2011)

Simulation is a big word.

As ever, the opposition isn’t virtual/real, but real = virtual+actual.

Without framing or labelling, seeded in the real world, such objects and material scenarios blend awkwardly into their surroundings. Fiction passing as truth. The closet of the (un)real.

So, when I talk of an ethics of design fiction, I’m really asking: to what extent is this thing we call design fiction built on deceit? What of consent? Is this even a problem?

Here, I turn to Jane McGonigal’s PhD thesis, This Might Be A Game – where she briefly touches on the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) as a case study for the performance of credulity.

This pioneering short film is an anchor the oft-repeated origin myth of film studies, in which, startled by the sudden appearance of an approaching train, a significant chunk of the original audience were reported to have screamed, fainted and fled the theatre.

A parable on the dangers of immersive media … and a myth soundly demolished by film historian Tom Gunning.

McGonigal (2006):

‘Gunning rejected the idea of an audience cowed by the cinema’s then unprecedented illusionist power, proposing instead that spectators were engaged in a sophisticated, self-aware suspension of disbelief. By feigning belief during their first filmic encounters, Gunning suggested, viewers framed their own experience, willfully playing along with the director. (…)

Today, as a result of Gunning’s work, the vast majority of film scholars reject the once-prevalent notion of panicked, passive, and hyper-receptive audiences. They recognize, instead, that the earliest filmgoers were playful and intentional participants in the creation and maintenance of cinematic illusion.’

Alternate reality games as the performance of credulity. Conspicuous consumption as the performance of affluence.

Could we unhitch conspicuousness and consumption? A world of Potemkin products; after the Potemkin village.

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A bright green, propositional design fiction?

To paraphrase Bruce: When will you be more environmentally friendly than your dead great-grandfather?

When all you consume is Potemkin products, made mostly of stories? When your furniture is future fab-feed? When your possessions and keepsakes have been digitised and uploaded to the cloud, continuing to be felt in your life as the imprint of so many semiotic ghosts?

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What can we say about thinking in public?

Design fictioneers as Sloanean media cyborgs par excellence, subsisting in those places where reality is at its thinnest.

The nascent role of the ‘in-house bard’ and the cult of the auteur.

Performativity, as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.’ (Judith Butler, 1993)

The disproportionate agency of certain non-human actants, when those actants are films, gizmos, hoaxes, or exhibits.

That uncanny sense of not being able to work out whether or not something is real, of not being able to feel out the joins between fact and fiction. Whispers of ontological uncertainty.

What, after all, is produced by design fiction?

Affect, belief, desire, conversations, discourse, fear, unease.

The technological imaginary?

The future?

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If they’re actually enacting the future, should design fictioneers have to work under a warning label? A kite mark, disavowing the reality of said artifact or film clip. A footnote, aknowledging the lack of a supporting material substrate.

And if not, why not?

Exquisitely shot footage, part of ‘Solar Sinter’, a final project from RCA graduate Markus Kayser. How’s that for sense-of-wonder?

((Echoes of Magnus Larsson’s bacterial dune-cement, Rachel Armstrong’s limestone-secreting Venetian protocells, Cesar Harada’s oil spill cleaning robots, and Project LiloRann. Apparently, our century’s mega-engineering is molar, scalable, and crowd-supported.))

‘Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”‘

– Kevin Kelly, ‘Scenius, or Communal Genius‘, The Technium, 10/06/2008

Engineering:

‘Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers.’

– YC Fung and P. Tong, 2001, Classical and Computational Solid Mechanics

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Key texts include the work of Steven Johnson, Joseph Schumpeter, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, the ‘soft’ architecture of Cedric Price and Archigram, the as-of-yet-unwritten obituary of East London Tech City, and any amount of behavioural economics. Organisational acupuncture. An architecture of micropolitics.

It might even be a career.

Design fiction in the service of art rock, and a killer example of cyborg sensoria. Splendid stuff.

More details and lively behind-the-scenes action over on the Superflux blog.

Roughly simultaneously, I’ve also been working with post-disciplinary design company Superflux; levering my newfound knowledge of cyborg anthropology to help with a project about (dis)ability and the post/transhuman sensorium. Here’s their enigma-drenched summary:

‘Between that, we are prototyping a series of ideas for our new Lab project titled ‘Song of the Machine‘, a mind-boggling optogenetics/neuroscience project in partnership Dr. Patrick Degenaar, Newcastle University and Dr. Anders Sandberg. This is a long-term project with different design aspects. But for now, our first short piece (to be done in less then 4 weeks!) is commissioned by the Science Gallery, Dublin, for their upcoming exhibition HUMAN+ The Future of our Species. Super exciting!’

It is, at that; and includes a trip to Ireland in mid-April – the perfect opportunity to collect some more material for a personal project on collapsonomics and European electoral politics.

In the meantime, some reading …

By me; hosted elsewhere:

• How should I design a trans-continental leisurely road-trip to maximize “literary potential”? [Quora; the seeds of what I'm tentatively naming 'Operation Cascadia']

• What was it like to take part in Superstruct? [Quora]

• Counterfactual Confessional [Storify]

• Life Map, version 0.1 [Flickr]

• ‘A critical analysis of Southland Tales (2007) in terms of its cognitive mapping of contemporary capitalist society’ [Scribd]

By other people:

• “It’s not a war, it’s a rescue mission” [m1k3y, grinding.be]

• Nuclear Counterinsurgency [Nick Mirzoeff, For the Right to Look]

• How Social Movements Happen (and part two) [Seb Paquet, Emergent Cities]

• Revolution from the Edge [John Hagel, Edge Perspectives]

• On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City [Adam Greenfield, Cognitive Cities]

• Closing Keynote, IXDA 11 [Bruce Sterling]

• The Future is Here Today, and it’s Superdense [Scott Smith, Changeist]

• New Europe: The life of a German family [Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian]

• On the Very Idea of a Super-Swarm [Dr David Roden, enemyindustry]

Gear Queer + Favela Chic? Brazenly ‘of the Zeitgeist,’ yet lo-fi and kind of understated. Bonus marks for Bowie and Google Earth.

And, once you’ve adjusted your brain, there’s even a website.

(via Rory Hyde and Emile Zile)

‘Fuller, born in 1895, is best known for his geodesic domes, but his ultimate hope was that the three-wheeled Dymaxion – which looked like a VW camper van crossed with a pinball flipper – would fly, allowing Americans to leave the highway vertically and touch down at lightweight aluminium homes, scattered wherever they fancied by a fleet of Zeppelins.’

– Jonathan Glancey, ‘Norman Foster’s back-to-front car,’ The Guardian, 05/10/2010