{"id":26565,"date":"2010-04-06T03:15:52","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T03:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/extending-this-idea-that-science-fiction-is\/"},"modified":"2024-09-26T11:09:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T17:09:38","slug":"extending-this-idea-that-science-fiction-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/extending-this-idea-that-science-fiction-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Near Future Laboratory and Design Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, with examples and some insights that provide a few conclusions about why this is important as well as how it gets done. How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called \u201cdesign fiction\u201d that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.
\nI don\u2019t mean this to be one of those silly \u201cproprietary practices\u201d things that design agencies are fond of patenting. This is much more aspirational than that sort of nonsense. It\u2019s part an ongoing explanation of why The Near Future Laboratory does such peculiar things, and why we emphasize the near future. The essay is a way of describing why alternative futures that are about people and their practices are way more interesting here than profit and feature sets. It\u2019s a way to invest some attention on what can be done rather immediately to mitigate a complete systems failure; and part an investment in creating playful, peculiar, sideways-looking things that have no truck with the up-and-to-the-right kind of futures. Things can be otherwise; different from the slipshod sorts of futures that economists, accountants and engineers assume always are faster, smaller, cheaper and with two more features bandied about on advertising glossies and spec sheet.
\nDesign Fiction is making things that tell stories. It\u2019s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It\u2019s about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It\u2019s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Near Future Laboratory \u00bb Blog Archive \u00bb Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted to think about how this happens, so that I could figure out the principles and pragmatics of doing design, making things that create different sorts of near future worlds. So, this is a bit of a think-piece, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2082,10],"tags":[42,156,357,1189,1459,257,975],"class_list":["post-26565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-tumblr-archive","category-words","tag-design","tag-design-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-julian-bleecker","tag-near-future-laboratory","tag-vision","tag-visionary-practice","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-6Ut","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56652,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26565\/revisions\/56652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}