Examples of Design Fiction
What is the purpose of Design Fiction?
The purpose of Design Fiction is to imagine into possible futures through material culture — tangible artifacts that represent the symptoms and implications of change. For example, we might think of a television remote control as an implication of a culture that values convenience and is habituated to entertainment through broadcast media, at a minimum.
Design Fiction is much less about prediction as its primary purpose. Rather Design Fiction is an unlock for expansive, generative brainstorming and ideation. It also has the purpose of some key elements of innovation practices such as: building up Strategic Resilience by engaging in robust foresight and exploration of potential unexplored opportunities; Team Synergy by creating opportunities for alignment or co-creation of vision; Efficient Resource Allocation, by developing clear insights into potential futures so that R&D and strategic investments can be made with more clarity and efficiency.
What makes Design Fiction distinct from other ideation or foresight methodologies is that it insists on the creation of a material cultural artifact. An ideation session that concludes with notes, a short story, or post-its is not Design Fiction. Design Fiction, like TBD Catalog or one of our Magazines from the Future, are tangible, material artifacts with details that have to be worked through and thus are a ‘deep dive’ into the future rather than a hand-wave and thought.
A Design Fiction Example: TBD Catalog
Here are several useful examples of Design Fictions that explore compelling examples of Design Fiction, from a visionary Annual Report from the future to futuristic breakfast cereals and innovative convenience store products. Design Fiction allows teams to dive deep into imaginative narratives that bridge today's reality with tomorrow's possibilities. It makes the intangible tangible, relatable, and compelling. It opens up conversations and provides room for the Imagination to wonder about what’s next, what’s possible. Design Fiction takes inspiration and translates it into true, meaningful, impactful innovation.
TBD Catalog: A Catalog of the Near Future’s Normal, Ordinary, Everyday
In 2012 I organized a group of 19 designers, curators, science fact and science fiction writers, students of science and technology studies, prototypers, cultural theorists, engineers, artists and makers to create "TBD Catalog" — in order to test the Design Fiction principles he had just described in his essay "Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction."
The brief I developed for the Design Fiction was this: consider the trajectories into the near future of the "big promises" of the day. We were to take the things that, in 2012, were liminal, just on the tip of the tongue of Silicon Valley and extrapolate these ideas and prototypes and make them into ordinary "things" in the near future. The task I set out was to decant even the most preposterous idea through a series of design procedures that would make it normal, ordinary, and everyday.
Why would I want to do this? Why commission a group to produce such a “report”- and then pretend-present it as a catalog of things? Quite simply he anticipated that, as an alternative to traditional ways of imagining, constructing and discussing possible near futures, a catalog that felt like it had been brought back from the future would prove more acute and resonant.
Rather than the staid, old-fashioned, bland, unadventurous “strategy consultant’s” report or “futurist’s” white paper (or, even worse - bullet-pointed PowerPoint conclusion to a project), Julian wanted to present the results of his workshop in a form that had the potential to feel as immersive as an engaging, well-told story.
TBD Catalog, an example of Design Fiction in the form of a product catalog from the future, available as an actual tangible product catalog at shop.nearfuturelaboratory.com
Motional and Autonomous Vehicle Futures
The $1.3bn autonomous vehicle company Motional came to Near Future Laboratory to help them imagine the self-driving future.
Motional is one of the largest Autonomous Vehicle entrants and the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture now in partnership with Uber to bring robotaxi services to North America.
Motional was seeking aspirational and visionary guidance as to the larger world of autonomous technology. Their senior design leadership wanted to run a 9 month program to gain a better, more vivid and acute representation of the the autonomous future.
Near Future Laboratory led them through a series of workshops and participatory sessions to help them translate reams of consumer analysis, trends reports, field work and technology opportunities and challenges.
We created a finely detailed magazine from the autonomous future that captured the fullness of possibilities and pitfalls of the autonomous future.
The purpose of the magazine was multiple including creating an engaging depiction of possible outcomes from identified trends such as the consequences of "transportation deserts" and malicious use of AVs, to insurance and vacation business opportunities, the expansion of autonomous vehicles beyond consumer uses to municipal services (autonomous dumpsters), children's toys that drive themselves, and nostalgic museums (Jay Leno's museum of steering wheels.)
The OMATA Adventure Lab 2024 Annual Report, created in 2020
Write Your Corporate Annual Report from the Future
Creating this ‘Annual Report’ was a Design Fiction exercise in translating a future vision into a concrete form that would be legible to a particular audience. In this case, Julian challenged himself to represent what it was he imagined the future looked like for his company, OMATA.
During the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine, he set himself to the task of writing the company's Annual Report — from the year 2024. With financial projections (which are always a fiction) and his hands-on strategic design sensibilities, he created the first Design Fiction in the form of an Annual Report from the future.
The main point was to produce a visually rich translation of his imagination for the future of the company that would hold more acuity, explicate more detail than could be represented in the typically concise and abbreviated presentation deck that starts from today, and ‘pitches’ forward. Rather, an Annual Report from the Future that pitches backwards has to get into the details at such a level that the who, what, how questions have to be answered as they might be were a CEO describing such details as if they already occurred.
The Annual Report includes details about the team, extensive details about the steps that ‘were taken’ between the years 2020 to 2024 to grow the portfolio through product engineering developments, collaborations with kindred brands, financial growth by department, challenges overcome, marketing and advertising campaigns, etc. Everything written, designed, modeled and rendered with compelling acuity to immerse the reader in the sense of imminent possibility.
IKEA Catalog
Julian was asked by the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm to prepare a workshop that would spark a conversation regarding the futures of connected things and the Internet of Things. Using Design Fiction he facilitated a workshop which resulted in the production of an Ikea Catalog from the near future. The objective was to dig into the details of a ‘home future’, discussing the known topics and raising many more unknown ones. He proposed the IKEA Catalog as a Design Fiction artifact for its compelling ways to represent normal, ordinary, everyday life in many parts of the world. contains the routine furnishings of a normative everyday life. The result is a container of life’s essentials and accessories which can be extrapolated from today’s normal into tomorrow’s normal.
This Design Fiction IKEA catalog is a way to talk about a near future. It is not a specification, nor is it an aspiration or prediction. The work the catalog does — like all Design Fictions — is to encourage conversations about the kinds of near futures we’d prefer, even if that requires us to represent near futures we fear.
The catalog was featured in the Design Museum’s “Home Futures” exhibition in 2019.
Tic-Tac breath mints containing pheromones to effervesce romantic attraction and ‘scratchers’ to win Twitter followers.
Deodorant with hangover cure; the Collected Works of Bruce Willis by KRAFT Media Co., Whiskey infused with Caffeine. Convenience goods from the Near Future.
Create Products for a Corner Convenience Store in some Future
The Corner Convenience is a vault containing the treasures of great, world-changing innovations throughout all histories. It is a living Neighborhood Museum of Innovation. Someone should enshrine these and teach the lesson to every secondary school student.
This project started with this observation — the trajectory of all great innovations is to asymptotically trend towards the counter of your corner convenience store. A cigarette lighter, a flashlight, a blister pack of aspirin, a folding map, a resealable bag of beef jerky. Consider for a moment how valuable and magical these would have been to pilgrims tramping their way west of the Mississippi River into unknown territory. A keychain with a laser pointer to entertain your kitten — Nobel Prize winning technology for $2.99 (comes in party colors.)
The purpose of the workshop was to materialize the output of a discussion on the ‘future of convenience retail’ in the form of a small film. The first half of Day 1 was spent in discussion on what great innovations today we might find in a convenience store in the near future. The second half of Day 1 had us identify artifacts that we could quickly manufacture that could embody and represent key aspects of the discussion — the Design Fictions. Day 2 was spent filming four scenarios that allowed us to exhibit these Design Fiction artifacts as small scripted vignettes in and around a nearby convenience/liquor store.
In order to explore the cultural implications of such hypothesis, we made a newspaper that took the things today and made them plain. This material served as the conceptual set-up for the subsequent Design Fiction workshop during the Emerge event at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. The outcome of this was a short film that depicts the Corner Convenience in some Near Future.
https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2012/03/04/corner-convenience-near-future-design-fiction/
A Design Fiction exploration of food futures considers ways of representing changes to consumer habits, norms, processes, and conventions through a material artifact as if it existed by creating tangible prototypes. The prototypes themselves do not predict. Rather they are conversation starters - and the collective creative work of teams contributes to a richer understanding of the worlds we may inhabit in the future.
A Box of Cereal from a Future
With any futures questions, the first thing I ask myself is: “What’s for breakfast in that future?'“
It’s the least clever thing — and often it truly stumps supposed domain knowledge experts.
“Why are we talking about breakfast?? The topic is Artificial Intelligence!”, they’ll say.
Future studies is often stuck in the game of prognostication and prediction. Design Fiction deliberately avoids this and instead creates provocations — things to help think and imagine change.
Oftentimes this is most effective with the Design Fiction is brought down to the normal, ordinary, everyday “user experience” — instances of possible futures that are symptomatic of change.
It’s been said that “culinary futures” or the “future of food” are often relegated to representations of nutrition as various pastes in different colors and textures, or powdered drinks optimally formulated to sustain life over a 24 hour period.
An alternative to this is the Design Fiction “Cricket Crunch”, a breakfast cereal made from insect protein. “Cricket Crunch”, as a Design Fiction artifact, evokes systemic change while reflecting such in a rather banal archetype — the normal, ordinary, everyday box of breakfast cereal. Through this archetype we can capture indicators of a slightly changed world, particularly when we go through the work of filling in all of the important and evocative details — ingredients, manufacturing details, brand design, packaging design details (scannable indicators, etc.).
Still frame from a touch-interaction Design Fiction moment in the “Curious Rituals” film.
Curious Rituals: The gestures, postures and digital habits occurring in the digital everyday
Curious Rituals is a project about gestures, postures and digital habits occurring in the digital everyday: recalibration of a smartphone doing a horizontal figure-8 sign with the hand, swiping a wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. The project consists of a book that documents current digital gestures, and a design fiction film that speculate about their evolution.
The questions we asked and the possible implications we arrived at in the project, should be relevant to anyone who is interested in imagining the future. These are starting points — evocative first questions about how technology could be domesticated, repurposed, recycled in interesting ways outside the status quo assumptions and mainstream technology discourse. In turn, we hope the conversations evoked during the project lead us into unexpected and unanticipated possibilities that will create more habitable, meaningful, non-corrosive near future digital rituals.
“People need a motivating vision of what comes next and the awareness that more will happen after that ... the future is a process not a destination. The future is a verb not a noun.”
— Bruce Sterling, Novelist and Futurist
Geneva Self-Driving City Map
Any decision-maker serious about evaluating the key opportunities of an idea, investigating challenges and possible complications, must consider the details through-and-through. This is what Design Fiction is good at. It is good at understanding the implications of today’s decisions. It reveals the ways futures could come to life and shows what that looks like in the form of material objects — the tangible artifacts from the future.
This is the reason why the Department of Mobility at the Canton of Geneva commissioned the Near Future Laboratory to investigate their “what if” scenarios around automated driving. Using the Design Fiction process, we selected an artifact that could reveal the implications for urban policy. We wanted a popular artifact, intelligible by a large audience. The point of doing Design Fiction is to create the artifact. That is, one goes through the work of actually making the artifact — not just crafting a write-up. To this end we created a foldable map of Geneva and brought it back from the future to be given out to the local public or tourists.
Intermediate UX/UI elements for the key components of the self-driving car experience. These would be presented by individual break-out groups and described, discussed and debated by the entire workshop.
The final output was produced as a tri-fold complete with illustrations, explanatory text for each interaction touchpoint, and a comprehensive FAQ section.
Scenes from a half-day workshop sprint to define the elements of a Quick Start Guide for a Self-Driving Car at the Interaction Design Conference 2015.
Quick Start Guide for the Self-Driving Car
During IxDA 2015, Julian and the Near Future Laboratory facilitated a Design Fiction workshop by way of creating a Quick Start Guide for a self-driving car. When addressing a complex, multivalent and somewhat fraught topic as personal/private autonomous vehicles, almost always the discussions remain someone abstract and ungrounded from everyday experience. Design Fiction offers an alternative. It grounds by embodying grounded experience than discussing aspects of autonomous vehicles in the abstract, we set ourselves to the task of embodying the technical, user-interface, user-experience, and hot-button socio-technical issues through the archetype of a Quick Start Guide.
Winning Formula
Winning Formula is project by the Near Future Laboratory and commissioned by the National Football Museum in Manchester. The project takes the form of a newspaper sports section from the near future to probe at the possible near future implications of big data, analytics, simulation and AI.
How will the so-called beautiful game of global football be different in a world where sport itself, and the culture of the fans who love it, is altered by the rush of data, quantification, analytics and digital delivery? What might a high-stakes match of the near future be like when every move is measured, and every tactic forecast by silicon? What will the technologically savvy supporter and the lifelong fan alike experience differently when Big Data takes on the game?
The newspaper was produced for hand-out at the museum. On March 28, 2014 — opening day at the museum — 130,000 copies were inserted into the Manchester Evening News as if the near future had arrived in the local newspaper.
Winning Formula touches on more easily seen aspects of performance analytics, and new ways to depict and consume football in media, but also explores future possibilities hiding just below the surface, possible phenomena such as data manipulation as a kind of doping, the impacts of high-frequency sport betting, or politics related to data-based services like media, measurement and reporting.
Slow Messenger
Slow Messenger is an instant messaging device that delivers messages exceptionally slowly. Built into the device is a messaging technology that unfolds its content based on an interface that borrows from the traditions of long-form letter writing, hand-carried mail sent through the post.
SlowMessenger works by simply receiving the message from the message sender. Once the message is received, it is gradually displayed, one letter at a time based on two factors. The first is the relative amount of time that the device is held; the second is the amount of time the device is carried while walking. These factors — holding-by-hand and walking-with — are interaction rituals key to the conveyance of intimate messages. In “another era” that is not the “digitally networked era”, “taking the air” and “perambulating” were crucial interaction rituals for maintaining and knitting together “social network” relations.
SlowMessenger, as in most Near Future Laboratory projects, works from unexpected, unusual assumptions in order to see how the user-experiences of communication from a different sense of things might be like. What can we learn about our existing social practices of communication – instant messaging, SMS, always-available styles of presence online – if we do an experiment where the assumption is the opposite? In this case, if we make communication much slower, what do we learn about new ways of relating and sharing with our friends and loved ones? It is very much an experiment in design as a way to answer some perplexing questions about the relationships we maintain through all these peculiar and compelling messaging systems.
Julian is a globally respected designer, creative leader, author, and entrepreneur. He created a movement and approach to design futures called ‘Design Fiction.’
Design Fiction is a practice that entangles design and fiction to create evocative artifacts that express the contexts and outcomes of change. It integrates design with the principles of narrative, speculation and fiction. The Design Fiction artifact effervesces a kind of implied story that can be thought to represent a symptom of a possible near future world. It is often used as an adjunct to more routine prototyping, ideating, and strategic foresight work, except that Design Fiction is more a “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” representation of near futures.
Design Fiction Backstory
While participating in a faculty study group while a professor at the University of Southern California, Julian was assigned the role to lead the discussion for Bruce Sterling’s just released book, “Shaping Things.” At the time, Sterling — a noted novelist, critic, and science fiction impresario — was ‘Futurist in Residence’ at the nearby ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Julian anchored the discussion around a short passage in which Sterling, almost off-handedly, signals the principles of ‘Design Fiction’.
The context was resonant, with Sterling emphasizing that, whereas science fiction “..wants to invoke the grandeur and credibility of science for its own hand-waving hocus-pocus” he was more focused at the time on the tactile and practical implications of emergent technologies. He referred to this as ‘design fiction’, which he described as a practice that “sacrifices some sense of the miraculous, but..moves much closer to the glowing heat of technosocial conflict.”
Julian spent the next year evolving this principle in conversation with Sterling. The result is his seminal essay on the topic, “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction”, that describes Design Fiction as a practice that constructs prototypes of possible futures in material form — making objects that, like prose-based science fiction, tell stories by implying possible future worlds.
“Julian is known for his work on 'design fiction', but it's not just words. Julian is an engineer, maker, designer, builder. He actions the ideas of 'design fiction' into real, plausible objects, products, and more. And that's his strength - a visionary thinker and lets-get-our-hands-dirty maker.”
— Anab Jain, Co-Founder & Director @ Superflux
The Manual of Design Fiction
Julian wrote his essay on Design Fiction in 2009. In 2019 he, along with his friends and colleagues at the Near Future Laboratory and the team at No Media Co, began working on a manual of Design Fiction — a book describing the principles, approaches, and practice of Design Fiction along with case studies based on the work they had done since 2009.
The Manual of Design Fiction serves as the canonical reference on Design Fiction, signaling it as a mindset and approach more so than a set of procedures or steps to follow.
http://themanualofdesignfiction.com
“Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there are other ways to do things and other ways to be. That there is not just one civilization and it is good and it is the way we have to be.”
— Ursula K. LeGuin