Stranger than Fiction…

Mark Blythe takes the award for writing the first paper that made me laugh out loud (in a good way) with Research through Design Fiction: Narrative in Real and Imaginary Abstracts. This lively and provocative 2014 paper discusses the effectiveness of design fiction as a tool in research through design processes, and investigates the role narrative plays in both research through design and design fiction. Concluding ultimately that design fiction is a cheap and effective way of exploring design space without the need to build a prototype thanks in part to the effectiveness of narrative as a mode of understanding design.

Beginning by asking why we prototype in research through design (RTD), Blythe explores a multitude of benefits and pitfalls associated with prototyping. Undeniably an important element of research, the prototypes of RTD suffer from frequent misunderstanding at the hands of the press (e.g. BinCam) and industry (e.g. every attempt to commercialise research projects ever). Blythe argues, that in a lot of cases, creating design fictions allows us to explore much of the same design space without having to actually create a prototype. This also has obvious benefits to time and cost.

Blythe then conducts a linguistic analysis of the top 100 papers on RTD taken from the ACM Digital Library, in order to create a solid basis for his following fictional abstracts. Identifying keywords and key structures, Blythe argues that RTD papers start generally by framing a problem, offering a prototype (with a cool new name) then findings and discussions which are frequently exploratory in nature rather than evaluative. Using this rough framework, Blythe offers a few design fictions, notably the Coin Operated Public Projection: Paying to avoid Public Art which if deployed in Gateshead would likely solve the council’s money worries for ever.

The fictions offered are interesting, straddling a space between entirely believable and wittily implausible, and with their narratives and user stories follow a tradition of ‘user fictions’ which has a strong heritage in HCI (see Weiser’s Sal). The fictions establish discursive spaces for design work, contribute to concept designs whilst still remaining ambiguous and allow us to see weak areas where prototypes do not answer research questions. All without having to actually create a prototype.

I understand why the ‘artsy’ approach of design fiction may be viewed with incredulous eyes from established ‘scientific’ HCI practice (also a problematic area), yet I must confess to being in agreement with, and excited by, Blythe’s conclusion that the use of narrative design fiction is a great tool for enriching the discourse of design. And a tool I will most likely be employing in my own work going forward.