The name of today's class is a direct quote from a paper by Julian Bleecker from Near Future Laboratory - Design Fiction: From Props To Prototypes - in which he articulates about the exercise of design that speculates about the future - "thinking through to the unexpected, unconventional, undisciplined and unheard-of".
Design Fiction
Design Fiction is a practice that allows designers to look into the future to explore and reflect upon the potential worlds they are creating. The practice of design fiction is similar to speculative design and critical design in that it uses props and design artifacts to pose questions about the future we want to design.
The term was first used by Bruce Sterling in 2005 but was later expanded upon by Julian Bleecker who tied the practice to the production of "diegetic prototypes." A diegetic prototype is a functional piece of designed technology that exists inside a fictional environment. It is a tool to better immerse people and help the viewer understand and envision technologies in the future as it relates to the fictional narrative.
Discursive Design
Design has an opportunity to go beyond the material practice implemented by the established field of product design that gave us attractive objects and desirable products which have made capitalism what we know today. Bruce M Tharp and Stephanie M Tharp opened the book "Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things" explaining:
"Products are protheses for praxis as well as the props with which the human drama plays out".
A major aspect of design practice is the intellectual exercise and opportunity to reevaluate systems of values and revitalize imaginations. Discursive Design achieves just that by being a vehicle to convey ideas. Within the taxonomy of design practices, Discursive Design is like a genus, which incorporates species like critical design, speculative design, and design fiction. The resulting design objects, or artifacts, of Discursive Design don't follow the utilitarian or aesthetic rules of commercial design. Instead, the artifacts are given a form and function to prompt the audience to think deeply, reflect and take part in the conversation.
Questioning the “critical” in Speculative & Critical DesignA Parede - L. Prado, P. Oliveira https://medium.com/a-parede/questioning-the-critical-in-speculative-critical-design-5a355cac2ca4
A speculative device to facilitate long term relationships via a virtual device. The goal here being to
