Process and Roles

What can be said about how these practices are carried out, both in terms of their approach to creating and the roles of various actors as producers and consumers of the work? Figure 21 shows the Process theme map.

Orientation

The practices can be thought of as falling along a continuum between two very distinct orientations, referred to here as the design-orientation and the

experience-orientation (figure 22). All practices produce tangible artifacts representative of speculative worlds (see 4.2.1), but those dominated by a Figure 21: Process theme map (see Appendix D for larger version)

design-orientation fundamentally seek to produce a design for an element of a speculative world, while those dominated by an experience-orientation

fundamentally seek to deliver an experience of a speculative world.

The mindset of the design-orientation is one of designing for a speculative future world. The practice is an exercise in problem-finding and/or problem-solving situated in a speculative context, with the goal of producing designs for novel artifacts or services that might exist in this context. In contrast, the mindset of the experience-orientation is one of creating an experience of a speculative future world. The objective is to deliver to an “audience” the experience of being in that world. That the experience must itself be designed (and the notion of

“experience design” is applicable here, as discussed in Candy 2010) is secondary.

The distinction between the design and experience orientations is somewhat porous. In the process of designing for a speculative world, the designer inevitably brings an experience of some elements of that world into being.

Conversely, to design an experience of a speculative world necessitates designing artifacts for that world. Nevertheless, the distinction is useful in

understanding practitioners' mindsets and processes. Design-oriented practitioners tend to follow a process inspired by the thinking and methods currently popular in the broader discourse of design. This process emphasizes making and learning through making. It is open-ended and exploratory, seeking and responding to new discoveries and possibilities, and welcoming of

serendipity. Prototyping, iterative refinement, and user involvement play

important roles. As might be expected, experience-oriented practitioners speak less about their design process, and in fact, less about the process of creation at all. Their attention is directed toward what happens after the speculative world has been materialized – toward the experience of that world.

It might be tempting to assume a simple correspondence between practitioners from design and futures backgrounds (see figure 5), and the design-orientation and experience-orientation, respectively. Indeed this seems to hold true for the Near Future Laboratory and Candy/Dunagan, who typify, respectively, the design and experience orientations. However, the other practices defy this simple logic.

With 5^th Dimensional Camera for example (figures 9 - 10), Superflux seems to be both designing a technological artifact for a speculative world, and

simultaneously designing an experience of that world for an audience in the present. Simun, a designer, seems to hold more of an experience-orientation.

While Human Cheese (figures 14 – 15) could be read as a design proposal, this is not the most natural reading, and the strength of the work lies in the visceral experience it creates for those who engage with it. And futurist Smith arguably

occupies the most design-oriented spot on the continuum. Future fabbing is by definition a process whereby workshop participants engage in the production of designs for future products or services, and the resulting mock-ups don't lend themselves to the creation of a highly realistic experience of this future.

Roles

Who participates in the process and in what capacity? Who is involved in producing the artifact/experience, and who is involved in consuming it? For example, with future fabbing, the workshop participants create the artifacts for themselves, and hence act as both producer and consumer. Contrast this with experiential futures, where there exists a sharp line between producer and consumer: the practitioners orchestrate an experiential scenario to be

experienced by others. However, this is perhaps an over-simplification. The act of creation doesn't end at the moment when the scenario is presented; in many ways the presentation is actually the beginning of a new phase of creation. This is evident in Simun's comment that the “experience is … collectively defined by the people that are participating in it...”. In section 4.2.1 it was proposed that regardless of whether a practice produces standalone artifacts or an immersive experiences, it is always aiming to produce experiences. To complicate matters, it seems that, in Simun's case at least, she produces the artifact but the

experience is co-produced by everyone who “participates” in it – those in attendance at the exhibition of the work, those who discuss it in the media, and those who engage in the general conversation spurred by the work.

Things are no less complicated in the case of the Near Future Laboratory. It would seem that the Laboratory is mainly a place for conducting experiments whose outputs simply feed back into the practice to inform further

experimentation, and hence that the practitioners are the main consumers of their work. Of the projects documented on their website, only a few indicate that they have been publicly exhibited. And yet, the web documentation can be viewed on some level as the primary interface for broad public engagement with the work.

Of course, it is questionable how effective an interface this is, given that it does not allow for the direct, first-hand experience of physical artifacts that is so important to the way this work functions. Nevertheless, it does allow the work to be consumed, at least visually, by a much larger number of people, and also makes it possible for unsolicited collaborators to contribute their thoughts during the process of production. The Near Future Laboratory often documents not only the “finished” products of its experiments (if such can be said to exist), but much of the process along the way. There are images of circuit boards and half-finished prototypes, along with play-by-play commentary about the process and any difficulties encountered. Anyone can respond by commenting on the

Laboratory's blog, or contacting the practitioners directly. As Sterling has noted, design fiction practices like the Near Future Laboratory unfold within a social network, and the various participants within this network can be said to be

“vaguely co-making and co-experiencing.” (Sterling, personal communication 2011)

In short, it is much harder to draw simple lines around who produces and who consumes than it might initially seem, and correspondingly difficult to draw generalizations about how these roles are acted out within the different practices.

Perhaps a key characterization is one of “open” vs “closed” - how open or closed the processes of production and of consumption are to the world outside of the practice. Yet even then a distinction must be made between the

production/consumption of the artifact(s) and the production/consumption of the experience. Furthermore, it is difficult to apply this characterization to each practice as a whole, as different projects within a given practice may be highly variable. And overall, the utility of this characterization is questionable within the context of this project.

Methods

What design and/or foresight methods are used? This research has yielded only relatively vague insights here. Storytelling seems to be an important aspect across many of the practices, which is not surprising given that the products are themselves representations of a scenario or story-world. Future fabbing and experiential futures make use of formal scenarios as a framework. Other foresight methods, such as research and analysis of events and trends, and weak-signal scanning, were mentioned as inputs to the process of some of the practices (specifically future fabbing, experiential futures, and design fiction).

Further inquiry into methods would make a good candidate for subsequent research.