Using Design Fiction to Explore Near-Future User Experiences in Libraries

ALAO Annual Conference

John Jung / @johnjungdotus
Kathy Zadrozny / @_kzadrozny
#alao2016

October 28, 2016

What is Design Fiction?

Jej: All designers “grapple with the unknowability of the future.” (Reeves, 2016.) A designer gets charged with the task of improving something. That improved something doesn’t exist yet, and the designer can only guess about what kind of future their work will find itself in. Design fiction is an emerging, slippery, open-ended kind of design practice. Some people contextualize design fiction as a research method; for them, it is storytelling about the near future that works as a type of anticipatory ethnography. (Lindley, 2014.) Others take a more critical, speculative approach. To them, design can “speculate about future possibilities” or be a “catalyst for change.” Rather than accepting the momentum of technological change as a given, where it might seem like a designer’s job is to implement the status quo, critical approaches let designers ask questions or participate in conversations about what kind of future is being created. (Dunne, 2013.)

What is Design Fiction?

Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955.

“Fiction is evolutionarily valuable because it allows low-cost experimentation compared to trying things for real.”

- Dennis Dutton

Play

Stuart Brown: Play is more than just fun
May 2008, Ted Talk

What Led Us to Design Fiction

"Bringing it Home: Tools to Bridge the Gap Between Inspiration and Real Action,"
Isabel Gonzalez-Smith, John Jung, Leo Lo
I2C2: Innovation, Inspiration and Creativity Conference. Manchester, UK, March 6-7, 2014

Jej: The I2C2 Conference was about “Innovation, Inspiration and Creativity” in libraries. I put together workshop for this conference with Isabel Gonzales-Smith and Leo Lo. We realized that at a conference like this it would be easy for participants to come back excited and ready to put ideas into practice, only to be discouraged when they tried to convince others back at their library to try something new. To help librarians get over that hurdle we developed a workshop to introduce them to Robert Cialdini's model of the persuasion process. We created a game to play at the workshop that would let participants practice “selling” their ideas to others.

Here’s how to play: the game has two players. One player is “the boss”. The boss gets a pack of idea cards. Each card contains an idea for an innovative library service. Some of the services are realistic, like “library offers computers for video editing.” Others are silly or crazy, like “wild animal rehabilitation” or “chainsaw carving”.

The boss chooses an idea card and says, “I’ve heard some office chatter about a new idea...is this...chainsaw carving in the library? Can you tell me a little more about this?”

What Led Us to Design Fiction

Scene from "Bringing it Home: Tools to Bridge the Gap Between Inspiration and Real Action."

Jej: The second player is “the persuasive librarian.” This player gets a set of six cards, one for each of Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence. This player’s job is to improvise a persuasive argument for the idea—in this case, chainsaw carving. The persuasive librarian might hold up the “Authority” card and say something like “So, my old college friend, Paul Bunyonsen, is a pretty well-respected wood carver. He’s putting a show together at that fancy new gallery up in Sheyboygan. We started talking, and it seems like his work could be a good fit for our library.” Holding up the “Commitment and Consistency” card, the persuasive librarian continues. “Anyway, the new strategic plan is for us to put together innovative programs that appeal to the people in our rustic, wooded community. And so I thought, what better way to do that than with chainsaws?”

The fictional world that we set up, with a librarian, a boss, a bunch of pre-made ideas, and Dr. Cialdini’s model of persuasion, gave participants the chance to practice a new skill. But we also observed that people were looking at the material critically—many people wanted to bring a deck of cards home so they could play with their bosses and coworkers. They didn’t want to use the material to exert influence over them; they wanted to use the material to spark conversations with them.

What Led Us to Design Fiction

"Brainstorming and Prototyping Workshop,"
Library UX Chicago, Chicago, IL. August 19, 2016.

"From User Testing to Prototypes: Making Observations Tangible,"
Designing for Digital, Austin, TX. April 6, 2016.

Jej: Earlier this year, we developed a brainstorming workshop for librarians. We presented this work in two different places- first at the Designing For Digital 2016 conference, and next at the Chicago Library UX Meetup Group.

We observed that it was really common in meetings to hear someone say, “Lets brainstorm.” However, the resulting brainstorming sessions tended to produce a small number of ideas, and not a large number. Because brainstorming sessions tend to generate a small percentage of high quality ideas, it’s important that participants are able to generate lots of ideas.

In order to give librarians a chance to practice brainstorming, we created a fictional grocery store we called Flipman Foods. During the course of a four-hour workshop participants receive a series of letters from Walt Flipman, the CEO of Flipman Foods, which challenge them to brainstorm ideas using different techniques.

On one hand, the letters are ways to introduce participants to different methods that can help them generate ideas. We introduce them to using background research as a way to inform the brainstorming process, and we show them how to develop short skits to communicate clearly about the ideas they come up with.

What Led Us to Design Fiction

Sample letter from "Brainstorming and Prototyping Workshop."

Jej: At the same time, the character of Walt Flipman is one element of the workshop lets us guide the kind of ideas that participants will generate. Participants get to know who Walt is, and they try to make ideas that Walt would like. Flipman Foods is a high-end grocery story. At the beginning of the workshop, when we asked participants about the last time they walked out of the grocery story with something they didn’t expect to buy, they gave us lots of examples of techniques they used to be sure they ONLY bought what they needed when they went shopping. But by the end of the workshop, they were coming up with ideas that would help Flipman Foods “encourage healthy eating and be environmentally responsible”, while still remaining “wildly profitable.”

By playing at brainstorming for a grocery store, participants get the chance to practice some new skills. In this case the short skits that participants developed were a way to quickly experiment with possible futures. Here the fictional world lets them borrow ideas from another industry.

Then, when the game ends, we can ask them to be critical again. We can ask, “Is there anything here that we could incorporate into the world of libraries?”

Precedents & Other Examples

Jej: When we design what’s going to happen in one of our workshops, we’re thinking about how to make an experience that is memorable, and that allows for exploration. Thinking of the Library Persuasion Game and the Flipman Foods brainstorming game, in each workshop we created a space outside of people’s everyday experience, where special rules applied. Then we used people’s inherent love of play to let them try something new.

After developing these playful experiences for workshops, we wanted to find a way to put what we were doing into context so we can find ways to push it further. Design Fiction is an approach that we find very inspiring, because of its storytelling and critical qualities.

We’ll talk about where the term “Design Fiction” came from, and we’ll give a few examples of some design fiction in the wild. If design fiction is something in you’re interested in and you’d like to experiment with, we’re including citations in these slides so you can follow our references and get up to speed quickly.

Speculative Design

Adapted from Henchey, N. (1978) Making Sense of Futures Studies. ‘Alternatives.’ 7 p24–29.

“We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and, although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening.”

- Dunne and Raby
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (2013)

Dystopian & Utopian

Design Fiction

Jej: Bruce Sterling is an author who wrote the short story anthology Mirrorshades. It is a defining collection of short cyberpunk science fiction stories. Vinay Gupta said that in order to understand the “Silicon Valley” mindset that is behind a lot of new, disruptive technology like Uber, you need to read cyberpunk fiction. This is because the ideas in that genre of fiction are like myths that drive a certain mindset of technological innovation that is happening in the world right now. He said that Bruce Sterling’s work is an ideal starting point. (Fiber, 2016.)

Bruce Sterling is also credited with inventing the term “design fiction” in this 2005 non-fiction book. “Shaping Things” is about the changing landscape of design, and how designed things have increasingly digital components.

In the introduction he says that “the ideal readers for this book are those ambitious young souls (of any age) who want to constructively intervene in the process of technosocial transformation...it’s for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers, and anyone else who might care to understand why things were once as they were, why things are as they are, and what things seem to be becoming.”

According to Sterling, this is important. First, because new forms of design and manufacturing are appearing, and the new forms have no historical precedents. Second, we need to move beyond current production methods, because they’re unsustainable. They “wreck the climate, poison the populace and forment resource wars.”

Maybe because Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author, it is natural for him to use fiction as a way to think through real world issues like the changing landscape of technology. In any case, the book presents a context for thinking about why design fiction might be useful. In a world where technological changes seem to be increasingly rapid and disruptive, it makes sense to think critically about technology and to work to find new ways to explore and think about near future possibilities.

His blog, Beyond the Beyond, includes links to interesting design fiction projects, upcoming exhibitions, and more.

Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction

Julian Bleecker picked up the ball of design fiction and ran with it, in this 2009 essay. He begins by noting how many fields seem to have the word “design” attached to them. There is service design, experience design, research design or even finance design. On one hand, this has the potential to “blanch” the word design of it’s meaning over time. But on the other hand, it also tries to indicate, “we haven’t entirely worked through what it means to do finance and design simultaneously. We’ll work it out, but we know this—we’re trying to do something different, and clever, and creative and thoughtful.” (Bleecker 2009.)

His approach is very much rooted in an appreciation of science fiction, and its ability to produce thought-provoking visions of what the future might be like. He describes the obsessive research that went into the making of the film 2001, from the visualizations on different control panels, to the materials that might be used to make space suits, to the companies and brands that might exist in the future.

The relationship between science fact and science fiction is really important to Bleecker. For him, design fiction is all about playing in the space between the two practices.

Design Fiction as Practice

"One is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities...which will carry one forward into a completely unknown territory"

Pierced Forms (1959)
Barbara Hepworth

KZ: Design Fiction has been used by artists for years from the small task of sketching to the final work of a performance piece. Yet, we are just beginning to catch on to what artists have been doing for decades. For example, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth used sketching and drawing as an exploratory medium; an art she felt was an "exciting adventure." She saw drawing as freeing since it didn't have the same rules as the solid materials she carved from. Hepworth would have no goal in mind but to put down lines, one after another. She described the act of drawing as being "lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into a completely unknown territory."

The thing is, a sketch artist would most likely have the same feeling of freedom when it came to sculpture because it is not their chosen medium. There is a framework for them to follow: hit this solid thing with a sharp object and make a shape. This is a general focus to follow, but there are no strict rules for them. This is what Design Fiction does for us. It allows us to work outside of our everyday medium, present reality, and gives us the freedom to embark on an "exciting adventure" full of possibilities.

Exploring Solutions

Bureau for Direct Democracy (1972)
Joseph Beuys, Documenta 5: Kassel, Germany

Report on a Day's Proceedings at the Bureau for Direct Democracy, by Dirk Schwarze

KZ: There are a multitude of ways to explore the range of possible futures with meaningful results. In 1972 the German artist Joseph Beuys turned education and discussion into art with his 'Bureau for Direct Democracy' performance piece. For 100 days Beuys held "office hours" and discussed political, artistic, and social issues with visitors. His goal was to come to a solution that would realize "true democracy." He didn't pre-define what "true democracy" was for the participants, but allowed them to explore what that meant to them. This allowed participants and Beuys to explore all possible solutions, both negative and positive. The openness of these performance-lectures were not bound by practiced or pre-determined events, but were intended to organically prompt further discussions by the audience during and after the performance. Beuys forced passive gallery visitors to take an active role in their possible futures.

The way Beuys encouraged participants to play with a broad goal is similar to how designers think about playfulness. This brings us something people call “ludic design.”

Homo Ludens

Jej: Right now the Chicago Cubs are playing the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. If I wear a Cubs hat in here, Indians fans might boo.

What are some of the qualities of a baseball game? It takes place in a special place—on a baseball field. You can go to a stadium to see a professional game if you want, but anyone who has ever played baseball could also make a field anywhere there is enough space. If you taught a child how to play baseball you would probably do it in a park or a backyard. You might say things like “that tree is going to be first base.”

Baseball has special costumes. Teams get their own special clothes, and umpires have a special way to dress. You see baseball hats all the time, even when people aren’t playing.

There are rules to follow. In order to play, all of the participants “follow the rules.” If you were teaching a really small child how to play baseball, they might start to improvise, and invent their own game. You might have to teach them about what it means to follow the rules. When you follow the rules in baseball, it’s more fun! If a teenager or an adult breaks the rules while playing, people will call it cheating. They might lose friends. If a professional player gets caught cheating, they could get fined thousands of dollars.

When it comes to baseball, players aren’t the only ones playing—being a fan is also a kind of play. There is lots to do when you’re a fan. You talk to strangers about what happened at the last game. You learn about legends or stories associated with you team. In Chicago, some fans are famous. It’s common to see Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers out and about, wearing his Cubs uniform, even when the team isn’t in town. I don’t know anything about the culture of Cleveland Indians fans, because I’m not part of that group. But I bet that people who follow that team have all kinds of stories too.

From the “outside”, being a baseball fan might not make any sense. You might be “into” something else that has its own culture. When people say they’re “into” something, what does it mean?

For a lot of these things, there is a certain designated place and time where people get together to do some kind of activity. There might be special costumes, rules, or traditions. When Johan Huizinga wrote about what it means to play, he called these qualities “the magic circle”. Whether it’s for a baseball game or something else, whether it is physically marked off or just agreed upon, inside that space, the participants all agree that special rules apply. What happens then and there is different from ordinary life. Inside the circle of the game “the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count.”

Design Fiction in Art

Play & Structure

Yard (Junkyard) (New York, 1961)
Allan Kaprow

Design Fiction in Art

"to assemble people unprepared for an event and say that they are 'participating' if apples are thrown at them...the response of such an [unprepared] audience is half-hearted or even reluctant."
- Allan Kaprow
Notes on Elimination of the Audience, 1966

Design Fiction in Art

Play & Structure

Fluids (Beverly Hills, October 1963)
Allan Kaprow
Photo by Dennis Hopper

KZ: This is a solid point–you need your participants to be in on the fun, not the butt of the joke. For example, Kaprow's 1963 happening 'Fluids' involved participants creating a simple structure out of ice blocks. You will have more enthusiastic participants if you preface the happening invitation with something like "be ready to get wet and to carry 20 pounds for several hours." Could you imagine showing up to this event without any warning and just be handed a brick of ice?

While individual play can blossom without structure, unstructured group play can produce meager or negative results. Design Fiction helps gives us this framework. Beuys chose a specific topic, location, and time frame for his piece. Contemporary designers do the same with their explorations, framing the type of technology within a specific future outcome. Within this structured play, one sits comfortably in the fuzzy mystery of it all.

design ≠ task performance

Jej: Bill Gaver is Professor of Design at the University of London. He was very much inspired by the ideas in the book Homo Ludens, and talked a lot about “ludic design”. In a 2007 interview, he talked about what he meant by that term.

“There are a huge number of activities that we pursue in everyday life that are not about achieving some external goal but are done merely for the sake of enjoyment and pleasure...by play here I don’t mean game play...I mean something much more fluid and self-motivated...examples of play are things like...fooling around with friends and taking on imaginary roles when you’re having a chat with them...or taking a new walk on the way home from work just to see where you get.” He continues, “it’s potentially quite culturally important to recognize and appreciate these forms of activities because more and more technology and design in general is conceived of in terms of promoting task performance and that means that it conveys a view that all our lives are about doing work, basically.” (Gaffney, 2007.)

Designing for Homo Ludens, Still

The Pillow, by Tony Dunne

Designing for Homo Ludens, Still

The Drift Table, by Tony Dunne

Design Fiction Group at the MIT Media Lab

Still from: “Open Source Estrogen: Housewives Making Drugs” by Mary Tsan

Design Fiction Group at the MIT Media Lab

Pop Roach by Ai Hasegawa

Design Fiction on Social Media

KENZO "The Realest Real" (2016)
Carrie Brownstein

Jej: Fashion brand Kenzo teamed up with Carrie Brownstein (guitarist for the band Sleater-Kinney and star of the comedy series Portlandia) for this short film about Internet fandom. In an interview on Kenzo’s website, Brownstein said the movie is about “the idea that you can kind of insert yourself into the narrative of someone’s life, and into your idol’s life, through visuals, through songs, etc.it became about exploring ideas of fantasy and projection, but taking a more absurdist view of that, when fantasy comes slamming into reality.” (Brownstein, 2016.)

[Play 3 mins of video]

Spoiler alert, this doesn't end well. Comments about the film on social media were especially interesting. “Relatable because I too want Natasha Lyonne to be my mom” and “I feel so called out by this...”

Design Fiction on Smart Objects

Uninvited Guests (2015)
Superflux Lab

Learning from Design Fiction

Uninvited Guests (2015)
Superflux Lab

Design Fiction in Practice

How could apps encourage better behavior?
Is there an app you continue to use because it integrated into your life well?
How could the smart tools work together?

Conclusion: Why Libraries?

Jej: When it comes to this kind of approach, we are feeling our way. We experiment, and see what works and what doesn’t. We look at different precedents to find a way to put what works into context so we can build on it.

This brings us to libraries, and why to us, this kind of thinking really makes sense in libraries. It has to do with the idea that was popular a few years back, of “the library as a third place.”

In “The Public Place of Central Libraries”, Gloria Leckie and Jeffrey Hopkins speculate about people in a knowledge-based economy. “People must continually educate themselves, upgrade their skills, and reorient themselves to new realities.” At the same time people are using libraries to remain relevant economically, they’re using libraries to “create culture.” Leckie and Hopkins describe a wide variety of creative projects they found people working on that “could not be characterized as merely recreational.” Patrons were using the library to inform things like theater set design, research for a film, or a photography exhibition. “Research suggests that the search for relevant information and its subsequent use in productive activity may be an integral characteristic of the construction of contemporary public culture in the emergent twenty-first century.” (Leckie, 2002)

If this is true, then ludic design design fiction might have some potential for both practical and cultural purposes, because in each type of use, people are playing with new realities. We hope you’ll look at design fiction from an optimistic, but critical perspective. Could you use this? Could you use a part of this?

Thanks.

Sources

Beuys, Joseph and Schwarze Dirk. “Report on a Day's Proceedings at the Bureau for Direct Democracy.” (1972)
Bleecker, J. (2009). Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction.Retrieved October 15, 2016, from http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf.
Brown, Stuart. “Play is more than just fun” (May 2008). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital?language=en
Brownstein, C. (2016, July 11). The Realest Real [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.kenzo.com/en/thereal.
Dunne, A., Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
Fiber. (Producer). (2016, February 25). Unrecognizable Capitalism. [Video]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/161183966.
Gaffney, G. (Producer). (2007, February 23). UXpod [Audio potcast]. Retrieved from http://uxpod.com/ludic-design-an-interview-with-william-gaver/.
Gaver, W. (2009). Designing for Homo Ludens, Still.
Ham, D.A. (2016). How Designers Play: The Ludic Modalities of the Creative Process. Design Issues, 32(4), 16-28.
Huizinga, J. (1944). Homo Ludens. Switzerland: Routledge.
Kaprow, Allan. “Notes on the Elimination of the Audience.” (1966).
Leckie, G., and Hopkins, J. (2002.) The Public Place of Central Libraries: Findings From Toronto and Vancouver. Library Quarterly 72(3), 326-72.
Lindley, J., Sharma, D., Potts, R. Anticipatory Ethnography: Design Fiction as an Input to Design Ethnography. 2014 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, pp. 237-253.
Reeves, S., Goulden, M., Dingwall, R. (2016). The Future as a Design Problem. Design Issues 32(3), 6-17.