Tribal Futures

...meets Open Source Design

Image via Tribal Futures website

Over at her blog The Future of Self-Knowledge, designer Jessica Charlesworth writes about her recent involvement as an "embedded reporter" for a class project in the Royal College of Art's fascinating Design Interactions MA program. Tribal Futures was a four-week collaborative effort between the RCA students and the user-experience group at Vodafone, with support provided by the mobile network company. According to the brief [pdf]:

The development of mobile telecoms so far has been about personal technologies -- there is little successful development or marketing to groups, although as social animals much of human activity and culture plays out in them.

Social theorists predict that traditional units of society such as the family are becoming less dominant, and instead -- elective, tribal groupings are on the rise.
...
The project's enquiry will focus in on the mundane and the extremes of our behaviour in groups and propose design interventions to support, subvert and celebrate our tribal connections.

We encourage you to extrapolate the current trends in mobile, social and other technologies in terms of their failures as well as successes, and examine what technologies [sic] intended and unintended consequences might be.

Magical nihilist Matt Jones of Dopplr (and formerly, Nokia), who was also involved with the project, clarifies that these terms were "deliberately wide and intended to steer us all from thinking about mobile phones". Accordingly, the variety of outputs was impressive -- as was degree of development that students were able to achieve in four weeks. Overviews of each piece of work can be found here.

Among my favourites are The Singing Flock by Louise O'Connor, who was inspired by the "fluid self-choreography" of starlings -- see the image at the top of this post -- to imagine an online improvisation space, which would display the voices of physically dispersed musical collaborators as flocking birds...


Ben Faga's web 2.1: humility through humanity imagines that vital bodily activities might be relayed, via Web 2.1 Underwear and other sensory apparatus, to our anxiously waiting networks...


And Dearbhaile Heaney's Constructive Hold Spaces would create transient communities and audiences out of the disparate individuals who happen to be stuck on hold in a telephone system at the same time...


Now, if you take a look at the Tribal Futures site, you'll find that each student's output (description, concept designs, drawings, etc) contains a link, in the bottom left-hand corner, back to his or her contributions to the group's research blog, the learning space for the project that Jess was brought in to help populate.

I really like this, and I want to use it as a springboard to draw out an element in the mix here which, at first blush, has less to do with the themes of mobile networks and tribal groupings, and more to do with the fact, as well as the manner, of this graduate design program unleashing its project work on the world. (Not everything that follows pertains specifically to this program, but it's a line of thought spurred by it.)

Of course, shows of students' work have long been a crucial initiation rite for intrinsically outward-facing professions like design and architecture, for the sake of exposure to potential employers and clients, as well as broader audiences (recall the recent example here about design-led futures). But at the risk of stating the obvious, as of quite recently it has become extremely simple to integrate the pedagogical process with the broader conversations and purposes to which a program may be committed. That is to say, not only end-of-semester assignments, but also things done en route (including content sharing, brainstorming, note-taking, and discussion -- all project-development activities which are often undertaken electronically) can be made public as part of The Bigger Conversation, too. Indeed, that's more or less what we did for my experimental future-jamming class last year, via a publicly-accessible class blog that documented students' learning as we went along, and especially as tangible elements of alternative Hawaiis (circa 02038) were conceived, produced and installed out in the world.

But the argument is not confined to an academic setting. Nor need the sharing necessarily occur right alongside the creative process (rather than being made available ex post). One example can illustrate both points: certain Hollywood feature films are developed under conditions of the strictest cloak-and-dagger secrecy, but the clear trend since well before the advent of DVD has been for increasingly exhaustive behind-the-scenes materials to be gathered or generated as part of the production process. These are incorporated either into extras with the home video release (on-set interviews, making-of featurettes, commentaries by cast and crew), or into movie tie-in products sold separately (coffee-table books featuring production artwork, costume and set designs, and on-location tales from the trenches).

To be clear; our claim here is not that public inscriptions along the designer's road are always and everywhere possible, or even desirable. Indeed, constraints routinely affecting commercial design contexts, such as confidentiality due to competition, or security concerns, or a simple desire to work away from prying eyes, may make it preferable for some designers not to talk about how the sausages are made.

Rather, the point is simply to note the increasing viability, and potential utility, of the by-products of the creative process being made more widely available (particularly, but by no means exclusively, around complex collaborations). It seems to me that the more comprehensively the journey can be recorded, so long as the material remains reasonably navigable, the better it stands to serve the cause of collective learning in the long run.

I am reminded of a post from a few years ago by the Near Future Laboratory's Julian Bleecker, who noted the importance of designers sharing their creative exploration:

The process and practice of moving from idea to final version is all too often a process of making the richest part of creativity illegible.

Why? Because oftentimes we don’t treat the practice of constructing objects and things as a kind of theorizing in itself.
...
I think capturing and even sharing widely ... these articulations at even embarassing [sic] stages would go a long way toward enrolling semantic objects into the larger ecology of social beings.
...
[I]n the knowledge ecology that is made possible by the world of connected thought -- the Internet -- creativity, innovation, making stuff that makes for more habitable, sustainable worlds is a massively multiplayer game.

It seems to me entirely sensible that the bigger processes and social challenges in which the design community is implicated are aided by lifting the curtain to reveal more behind the scenes activity.

Let's return to the context which prompted these thoughts: the Design Interactions program is well known for its dedication to a distinctive set of emerging strands, or approaches to research, in design practice; among these are design futures, design for debate, design fiction, and critical design. (Here I should note the current controversies and debates over terminology within the field. In a interesting recent piece by Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp at the widely read industrial design website Core77, a four-part typology for industrial design is suggested, each type being determined by the designer's main intention. Using the language proposed there, the approaches named above could reasonably be characterised as a combination of experimental and discursive design, as opposed to responsible or commercial design.) Still, regardless of precisely what we call them, there is a clear idea in all this that the outputs (designs, artifacts) themselves are not to be regarded as finished objects, but instead, or more importantly, as catalysts for further thought, discussion, and exploration. In that sense, then, they are deliberately, strategically tentative.

A relatively open attitude towards sharing the creative process by which they are generated is in fact an extension of the spirit of the whole undertaking: since even the finished product isn't, traditionally speaking, a "finished product", earlier stages of the discussion form an equally legitimate part of the conversation. This ethos is entirely in keeping with a commitment to educative, publicly-oriented and catalytic uses of design practice. In other words, we could say that in addition to the above characteristics, it's also Open Source.

It is a curious and felicitous side-effect of this intellectually generous modus operandi that the program and its students could be said themselves to be modelling a key behaviour for the development of future "tribes" -- i.e., voluntary affinity groups based around shared (in this case, design) sensibilities, commitments, ideas, and passions. In other words, their relative transparency and online openness towards the wider world may make this group a particularly fine example of a 21st century tribe in action.

And, to bring us full circle, Jess's role as an embedded reporter -- or if you prefer, tribe scribe -- embodies this Open Source commitment, as well as the 21st century affinities idea, rather well. Her designated contribution is, one could say, to serve as a conscious agent, cyber-archivist, and advocate for the collective identity and memory of the group, via the documentation and preservation of its discovery process, for both internal and external audiences' contemporary and future reference.

A quick word about Jess, whom I met at the New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living conference held at Lancaster University last year (where she was also the designated -- and very European-sounding -- programme rapporteur). Jess is an alumna of the fascinating Design Interactions MA, and protégée of critical design pioneers Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne. She has also, among other interesting things, founded a hypothetical organisation called The Futures Association for Therapy and Entertainment, or The FATE Institute, "a fictitious future forecasting institute that acts as a vehicle to generate personalised future forecasting services". It explores "the cross fertilisation between three methodologies of future forecasting; ancient divination, corporate futurology and predictive gene testing" (a frighteningly plausible ménage à trois involving science, pseudoscience, and good old fashioned quackery).

It is with great thanks to her and to Fiona that I announce the happy news that I'll be joining the current Design Interactions group in London for several sessions later this month, to help introduce them to futures and its usefulness in supporting design exploration -- and vice versa.

I can't wait to meet the rest of the tribe.

Related posts:
> Future-jamming 101
> Object-oriented futuring
> Design-led futures
> The MacGuffin Library
> Open Source futures and design
> Public service and self-promotion meet on the adaptive path

Object-oriented futuring

Designer and researcher Julian Bleecker of The Near Future Laboratory and Nokia is currently airing some interesting ideas under the title "Design Fiction" (a Bruce Sterling coinage that t.s.f. readers may recall previously seeing here and here). In the past month this has included variant presentations at Design Engaged in Montreal, Shift08 in Lisbon, and most recently, Moving Movie Industry in Amsterdam -- the last of which I discovered via Sterling's twitter feed.

Bleecker's Design Fiction slideshow, from the Shift08 version of his presentation, appears below.

(Those interested may compare it to the earlier version given at Design Engaged.)

The general burden of his argument (quoting from the introduction -- see Slideshow Transcript, Slide 2) is that design can be considered or used

as a kind of story-telling practice, crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds and through those visions doing more than presenting an inert, lifeless object. Rather, design can turn ideas into material, but also insert that material into a larger setting with broader social contexts and consequences, and through that create a compelling story about a possible future. In this way, the design object becomes an important property of the world. And its [sic] this notion of a property in a larger narrative-based context that I will ultimately highlight in this talk. A prop, to borrow from film and theater production — that helps move a story forward.

In his presentation Bleecker references the work of David A. Kirby, a lecturer in Science Communication at the University of Manchester, who offers a very interesting way of framing the real-life usefulness of sci-fi movie props:

for Hollywood technical advisors cinematic depictions of future technologies are actually "diegetic prototypes" that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology's need, benevolence, and viability. I show how diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes: in the diegesis these technologies exist as "real" objects that function properly and which people actually use.

[From Kirby's forthcoming paper, "Screening Technology: Technical Advisors, Diegetic Prototypes, and the Cinematic Creation of the Future", quoted at Material Beliefs blog, 21 May 02007.]

The notion of diegetic (in-world) prototypes rhymes with much of the thinking at this blog around communicating alternative futures, and in particular the importance of diegetic integrity as expressed in our experiential scenario mantra, Don't break the universe.

I agree completely with Bleecker about the use of design "to create a compelling story about a possible future". Storytelling through concept design can be so effective that in fact to provide a literal narrative set in the future to go with it may actually be unnecessary, if the in-world design elements properly invite immersion in their own right. Such was the case with architect Bryan Boyer's provocative thesis project of redesigning the U.S. Capitol building.

"Design fiction" sits at the intersection of storytelling and design. From a design point of view, it makes sense to recruit storytelling techniques to render a design more compelling. But the relationship can work in the other direction; indeed the point of film props is that they help tell the story. It seems useful to admit that from a designer's point of view, design fiction is principally a way of extending engagement with a design problem space, while for a futurist, by contrast, the same tools are regarded as a means to a larger end; namely, to help people (usually their clients) explore the various "worlds" (or contexts) in which they may find themselves several years or decades, or longer, from today.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are in tension. Not long ago, I oversaw a project in which our team was producing future-images -- say, two to ten years out, for argument's sake -- for a client developing a prototype application (details of which we won't go into here). The agreement was that we would use visual "artifacts from the future" to suggest how the world could eventually look to a user blessed with the functioning app. We found that, having iterated on the design once or twice, and upon delivering a completed scenario-exploring image, the client would (as hoped and expected) identify a range of second- and third- order design issues that had not been on the table until the initial image became available to "think with". One curious finding was that to evoke the social and personal impacts of a relatively distant-future application, at a general level of abstraction helpful to investors and project managers for instance, tended to require a certain suspension of disbelief; the use of an evocative artistic licence at the expense of literal "accuracy". Subsequent iterations, which the client requested to address more of the concrete, granular design and engineering issues, became less clear and impactful; though they were more useful for the day-to-day project implementation level, they were also somewhat more prosaic in their details.

So, design fictions (or diegetic prototypes) intended to advance technical implementation and those oriented to advancing systemic or social understanding are not quite the same species. In the case described above, we found ourselves doing what designers usually do (assuming a range of continuities to enable and elaborate a single preferred scenario for the product), rather than what we as futurists were more accustomed to doing (systematically exploring possible discontinuities in order to produce a more robust strategic stance).

For a futurist, or at any rate for me and my colleagues, future artifacts themselves are like so many forward-facing MacGuffins, heuristic devices carefully crafted to help tell engaging stories. They enable and animate deeper exploration of the various relationships and values at stake in a particular future scenario, and (I argue with monotonous regularity, from various angles, in this space) their value for that purpose is multiplied many times over when artifacts "from" different future worlds can be devised and explicitly brought into conversation with one another (as in our postcards intervention, among others). This blog contains abundant testimony to the process of futurists discovering that this exploratory function (traditionally abstract -- verbal, textual, and statistical) can be carried out much more effectively when an immersive, experiential, radically multimedia approach is adopted.

From the design side, too, the same connection is being made. For instance, Adaptive Path's Peter Merholz recently described the gradual integration of futures thinking into their company practice. Last month we learned about experience designer Nathan Shedroff's take on futures thinking. Similarly, Bleecker's Near Future Laboratory colleague Nicolas Nova has spotted the connection between their work and that of FoundFutures, our series of multimedia public art interventions to make alternative futures experientially available to people in their everyday lives ("guerrilla futures").

Yet despite these promising signs of mutual discovery and learning, there remains something of a disconnect between design and futures discourse. In part this arises from the fallacy of monofuturism (held not only by many designers, but plenty of others also, including some self-described futurists). I am referring to the fundamental yet distressingly widespread misconception that engaging the yet-to-be means trying to predict "the future" rather than exploring alternative futures. (See for example the slideshow from Nova's recent Design Engaged presentation; "inflated deflated future(s), or... why futurists fail to predict futures".†) To use Bleecker's imagery, it's my observation that almost all design tacitly assumes a single, linear future, and evinces nothing remotely like the complexity of Latour's manifold conception of imagined futures. (Gibson's "unevenly distributed" aphorism is often misused as a stand-in for a more multi-dimensional theory of how change happens -- i.e., the future is X, but not everyone catches on at the same time -- a mere variation on the monofuturist's theme).

To bridge this gap, as I picture it, would probably involve designers mastering the foundations of futures studies,∞ and collaborating with futurists in experientially manifesting genuinely diverging future scenarios, on an ongoing basis, both for instrumental design-improving purposes and for broader world-exploring ones. Futurists ought to learn as much as they can about design, too -- but let me be clear. Good storytelling is a necessary precondition for good design: with or without the involvement of designated "futurists", the rigorous elaboration of alternative futures is the sine qua non of meaningful choice.

As we've seen above, "design fiction" sits at the intersection of storytelling and design. Turning this theory object over in our contemplation, we see that not only can storytelling help designers (as suggested by the design fiction story in Sterling's 02006 collection, Visionary in Residence), but also, flipping it around, that design can be deployed in the service of stories addressing bigger topics, such as future scenarios for our industries, communities, cultures, and planet.

The values-laden, story-driven, aspirational design and pursuit of alternative futures among which we may choose more wisely is among the most urgent challenges we collectively face.

[Updated Sept 19, 2015 to fix embedded slideshow.]

Related posts:
> Don't break the universe
> The MacGuffin Library
> Future-jamming 101
> Architectural time travel> Findability features FoundFutures

† Nicolas Nova presentation via Overmorgen.
∞ If the existence of a field of study called futures is news to you, dear reader, then futurist and political science Prof Jim Dator's article "The future lies behind! Thirty years of teaching futures studies" may be a useful starting point.