Design fiction, emerging

It's almost a year ago to the day since design fiction impresario and sometime science fiction author Bruce Sterling emailed me this tantalising provocation:

The imminent question is, what does a "design fiction event" look like? I'm figuring it has some public aspects, like a design-fiction Vimeo showreel and maybe some conceptual objects or experiential futures. Plus a seminar, workshop aspect where we get some of the operators in a smoke-filled room and talk about what Design Fiction would look like if it was something akin to a department of a university.

Long story short, from this early conjecture something quite special is about to emerge. That something is called... Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future.

It gets underway at Arizona State University in Phoenix tomorrow, culminating in an extravaganza on Saturday 3 March which shows every sign of being bigger than Ben Hur. The dazzlingly cool program is described over at PhysOrg (via Sterling's blog Beyond the Beyond). In addition to Mr Design Fiction himself, keynote speakers include Stewart Brand, Bruce Mau, Neal Stephenson, and Sherry Turkle, among many other exciting contributors and attendees.

On the program as well is a set of parallel futures-type workshops, being run by such design-fiction allstars as our friend Julian Bleecker of the Near-Future Laboratory, and Intel's Brian David Johnson. The ASU-resident organisers of this improbable venture, particularly Cynthia Selin (whom I've met before) and Joel Garreau (whom I haven't) are an extraordinarily dedicated and clued up lot, and it has been an adventure and a gas just getting to Emerge's eve. Perhaps the sole drawback here, an unavoidable side-effect of so rich a schedule, is that invitees can join only one of the many tempting workshops -- a limitation which also understandably applies to us as facilitators.

So, what am I doing? By early November last year, the concept was beginning to take shape...

This experiential scenario workshop and intervention will consist of creating a monumental artifact zapped back from the future, and possibly a ritual wrapped around it. Much as the obelisk in Clarke and Kubrick's 2001 casts a kind of noetic forcefield, exerting an evolutionary magnetism on the apeish protohumans at the Dawn of Man, so will this monument drag all conversations in its ambit into a forthcoming era.

Then, Institute for the Future's Jake Dunagan, my long-time collaborator from back in Hawaii, came on board -- and all bets were off. This was going to be frigging cool.

The thinking continued to evolve. And last week, our part of the event was described to the then still-congealing cluster of ASU and external participants as follows:

The People Who Vanished
A design fiction playshop
with Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan

From time to time in the course of human experience, a discovery is unearthed which overturns the accepted view of the world. In the history of culture such a moment may be so significant that it’s as if the very ground on which we stand had suddenly shifted beneath our feet.

The People Who Vanished will be a participatory, transdisciplinary and creative playshop aiming to stage just such a transformative discovery.

‘Design fiction’, is has been said, is the ‘deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change’. The People Who Vanished will create a monumental design fiction artifact to catalyse a sort of ‘archaeological moment’ around reperceiving life in Phoenix as we find it today. Participants in this unique playshop will ‘discover’, during Emerge, a crucial and disruptive artifact from a very different time period – all captured on video for posterity.

In the process, we will co-develop a unique design fiction and experiential scenarios methodology with two leading futures/design practitioners, Stuart Candy (ARUP, The Long Now Foundation) and Jake Dunagan (Institute for the Future, California College of the Arts). Come ready to work and play hard; to be surprised and above all to generate surprise.

It remains our firm intention to maximise group discovery and input over the course of the next couple of days, as well as to adapt as nimbly as possible to inevitable resource and time constraints; so the above necessarily remains just a point of departure for a profoundly unpredictable creative process.

We'll let you know what emerges.


(Update 03aug16: A peer reviewed article about The People Who Vanished was published in the journal Futures; a brief excerpt and links to further reading can be found here at The Sceptical Futuryst.) 

The compleat Wired future artifacts gallery, 02010

Please find attached herewith, sirs and ladypersons, for your perusal and delectation, another year's harvest of 'Found: Artifacts from the future', Wired magazine's perennial back-pager and, if I may make so bold, its star feature; edited lo these many moons by the one and only ChrisBaker1337.

[wildlife] | Wired 18.01

[pet toys] | Wired 18.02

[medicine] | Wired 18.03

[athletic gear] | Wired 18.04

[children's books] | Wired 18.05

[camping equipment] | Wired 18.06

[medical bills] | Wired 18.07

[in-flight entertainment] | Wired 18.08

[playground] | Wired 18.09 | Prior photoshop contest in 18.06

[dive bar] | Wired 18.10

[taco truck] | Wired 18.11

[retirement home] | Wired 18.12

For a while there, these features were gathered under a single page at Wired, but at the time of writing, said page had not been updated since April 02010. (This post is arguably more over a year in arrears itself, so no accusatory fingerpointin; just sayin.)

Meanwhile, interested parties can delve into the compleat annals of Found dating back to 02002, right here.

Windows on to urban futures

All photos by Anthony Crescini
  Via arupaustralasia's Flickr stream

PARK(ing) Day is "an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good."

This open source project originated with San Francisco based group Rebar in 02005, and has since spread rapidly around the world. The following year saw 47 PARKs appearing in 13 cities including New York, London, and Rio de Janeiro.  Last year, in 02011, the official tally was a remarkable 955 PARKs in 161 cities, across 35 countries on six continents.

Arup's Sydney office participated in the 02011 event, and although I couldn't be there on the day, during an earlier visit I helped project coordinator Safiah Moore and her local team craft the concept for a "Cut N Paste Future Booth". This refers to an ongoing strand of investigation by Arup's Foresight + Innovation team, Cut N Paste Cities, in which people are invited to look at the city as subject to their own process of editing or reinvention.  Our idea here was to turn an on-street parking spot into an opportunity for people to imagine desired changes to the cityscape from that vantage point, superimposing their visions over the present-day view.

With this in mind, the Arup PARK(ing) Day team planned a concertinaed array of doors, framing views of the street to be progressively overlaid with drawn and written annotations.

Sketch by Alex Symes

In this way, the installation would provide passers-by with a series of windows (literally) onto alternative futures for this part of downtown Sydney; a kind of neoanalog augmented reality app.

A short video was produced (by Sydney-based creative collective Thirteen Itches) about the finished installation, with various participants chiming in on the conversation.



Arup Sydney has participated in PARK(ing) Day several times before; in 02010, 02009, and 02008. But to put this annual project into a wider context -- alongside popup cafes, guerrilla gardening, street fairs, and more -- early last year a useful overview document called Tactical Urbanism was produced by the Street Plans Collaborative and the Next Generation for New Urbanism (a.k.a. Nextgen). It provides an illustrated typology of urban interventions, which opportunistically create "a laboratory for experimentation" with urban possibilities, using the streets themselves.

The increasing popularity of these sorts of events reflects not only a technological facilitation process thanks to layers of hardware (ever-cheaper smartphones and cameras) and software (social media and content-sharing services), but also, perhaps more importantly, a human or cultural layer coming into resonance with those. There is a virtuous cycle of awareness, motivation, action and capacity on the part of city dwellers, who are fast adopting a more active role in shaping their surroundings, whether officially sanctioned or not.

As to the underlying intentions of this specific project, Safiah says, quite poetically:

We want to get to a point where;

Everyday we are injecting activity into the urban landscape,

Everyday we are imagining the possibilities for our city,

Everyday we are engaging with the city and having conversations about what we want to see in our city,

Everyday we are providing a taste for what is possible.

This hands-on conversational catalyst, aimed at getting citizens to think about and discuss the futures of their immediate surroundings, offered a modest yet meaningful step towards that vision, by using the street itself as a platform for visualising its reinvention.

This year's PARK(ing) Day is on Friday, 21 September. You can join in the fun through the project website.

Related posts:
> The Futures of Everyday Life
> McChinatown
> Future-jamming 101
> Four future news clips from MIT

On the money

Image via [pdf].

Today, while browsing one of Melbourne's excellent bookstores -- which are still surprisingly abundant, despite global publishing industry turmoil -- I came across this striking image on the cover of an Australian literary quarterly, Meanjin.

It's from a 02008 photograph series called Oz Omnium Rex et Regina (King and Queen of All Oz) by Darren Siwes, an artist of indigenous Australian and Dutch descent.

A bit of context for international readers:

[The photograph] depicts a recognizably Australian gold coin, close-up. The words "Mary I, Australia 2041" are emblazoned onto its shiny surface. The future reigning monarch bears a distinct resemblance to a local, high-profile Aboriginal woman, leading viewers not only to question Australia’s current (and to many, anachronistic) constitutional monarchy, but also its legal legitimacy. In terms of natural justice, the obvious question arising is, "Why not an Indigenous monarch, or at least, an Indigenous head of state?"

~Christine Nicholls, "A Festival Of The Spirit" [pdf; essay reviewing the 02009 South Australian Living Artists Festival, in which this work also appeared]

Below is the obverse of the one dollar coin now in use, which, like all Australian coins, bears the image of Queen Elizabeth II. Who lives in, um, England.

Image via. [Note that the version of the Queen's head struck in Australian coins
does change periodically, loosely tracking the ageing process.]

Now, as some readers may guess from this blog's usual focus on experiential and performative scenarios, regarding the choice of medium, I personally resonate less with series of gold and silver painted-busker-statue type photos, appearing mainly in art galleries or literary reviews, than I would with an alternative execution of the same idea, in which the coins were physically produced, a tangible and diegetic (in-story) artifact, manifested, integrated and discoverable in everyday contexts, today.

Image via.

In any case, the proposition offered here remains challenging and culturally relevant, and currency proves an especially potent symbolic vector in which to embed it. Like other future artifacts from the same "family" -- e.g. the Amero, or the Aung San Suu Kyi kyat -- this embodies the hypothesis of an epoch-making change of governance in the near future, and it invites us to spend time with the idea for real.

Image via.

"Culture is something that is done to us. Art is something we do to culture."
~Carl Andre *

Related posts:
> The currency of Burmese dissent
> The value of hypothetical currency
> The act of imagination

* Quoted in Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World.

The act of imagination

Artwork: Imaginary Foundation [source]

The imagination can create the future only if its products are brought over into the real. The bestowal of the work completes the act of imagination. ... [W]hen we refuse what has been offered to the empty heart, when possible futures are given and not acted upon, then the imagination recedes. And without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present; we will never be led into new life because we can work only from the known. ... The artist completes the act of imagination by accepting the gift and laboring to give it to the real (at which point the distinction between "imaginary" and "real" dissolves).

~Lewis Hyde, The Gift

An outstanding book, by the way. As is Hyde's follow-up, Trickster Makes This World.

Strategic Foresight and the Design MBA

An element of a crowdsourced scenario development exercise
run by guest presenter Noah Raford  |  Photo: Riaz

Last year I was invited to teach a brand new class, Strategic Foresight, in the Design MBA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

A while later DMBA's Chair Nathan Shedroff asked each faculty member to contribute a brief article to a collection serving as a showcase and snapshot of the program -- which is unique in U.S. business education -- two and a half years after its founding in 02008.

That collection, Design Strategy in Action, has now been published. My piece introducing some of the basic thinking behind the Strategic Foresight class can be found here (pdf hosted by ResearchGate).

Feedback is welcome.

I'll take this opportunity to reiterate the acknowledgements appearing in the print edition: I am grateful to Dr Jay Ogilvy for being a delight to teach with, and to guest speakers Jamais Cascio, Napier Collyns, Dr Jake Dunagan, Erika Gregory, and Noah Raford for their excellent contributions to the inaugural Fall 2010 class. I would like to acknowledge Nathan Shedroff and Teddy Zmrhal for providing exceptional support and freedom as I developed the Strategic Foresight syllabus, Dr Wendy Schultz for highly valued input during that process, and finally Professor Jim Dator for his incomparable example as a futures teacher.

  Christie presents an experiential scenario about social media  |  Photo: Riaz

(Update 08aug16: replaced old article link to pdf as published and laid out in book.)