Design Fiction
“How will the future be?” is an intriguing question. Mainly because the answers may help us prepare for threats and opportunities. There are even professional futurists who dedicate their lives to finding answers. This is also a question that science fiction embraced more than any genre or ideation activity. But there's a problem: normally authors go too far and describe crazy realities. The dystopic world is a constant.
Between the creative and the professional, there are the designers who propose a simpler, practical and hopefully useful way to find answers about the future: design fiction. The practice provides imagination-driven explorations for plausible futures. The Manual of Design Fiction defines the concept as “… the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” Diegetic prototype? Yes. Diegetic prototypes are meant to capture how the objects, products and technologies featured in movies — and hypothetically grounded in science — are used to support and help generate plots.
With design fiction, it's possible to add imagination into how foresight research is practised and how it's communicated to the world. The authors of the manual believe that design fiction helps inform insight, strategy, and decision-making for large organizations. It can also reshape internal culture, helping teams be more flexible and prepared in the face of future uncertainty by
Fostering creative collaboration, dialogue, critical thinking, and ultimately alignment across departmental silos;
Considering future risks and opportunities in new ways, through the exploration of externalities, co-evolutions, and what-if scenarios;
Probing at biases, untested assumptions, and blind spots;
Encouraging people to think as much about the implications of a new technology, product, or service, as they do about its applications.
On the business design side, design fiction might be too big of a stretch, but depending on the disposition of the venture, it can help with the development of innovative products and services. Maybe, more than a practice, having design fiction as a mindset may contribute to increasing the level of openness to innovation in companies.