Publish at February 11 2021 Updated December 01 2022
How do we provide a tangible representation of a possible future? How do we foster debate about our directions for the next few decades? How to give to see the possible consequences of weak signals or contemporary choices? One answer lies in design-fiction, which proposes to produce objects or services that make a more or less near future concrete.
If the approach has sometimes become a tool of seduction, Design Friction, co-founded by Bastien Kespern uses it and pushes it further to give to debate, to make visible the paradoxes, the dead ends and the impasse around our representations.
Design fiction is a narrative method that stages objects and services that could be commonplace in the future. This method presents a vision of the coming decades based on these objects. Because these artifacts seem real, they encourage debate and discussion. They invite us to slow down to initiate collective reflection.
So the designers produce realistic prototypes, instruction manuals, advertisements, newspaper articles, packaging, photomontages, catalogs, pastiches of scientific articles, and especially videos. The approach consists of imagining a possible future based on weak signals and trends. The designers then create objects that make everyday life in this future tangible. These objects tell in their own way, and more than an explanation, what this world would be like. The third step is to debate with the people who are confronted with these objects. It is a "design to debate". The prototypes do not aim at production or industrialization.
The point is indeed to present an image of what happens to us. A vision among others, because design fiction does not predict the future. It gives a glimpse of what could be, if we extend certain lines of the present. Above all, it allows us not to confine ourselves to a representation of the future as the same thing in a brighter, faster and more gigantic way.
This approach echoes certain series such as Black Mirror, which push current trends and directions to imagine a future where the choices of governance, social organization and relationship to objects and digital would have drastically changed the daily lives of
The method is effective. It is so effective that economic actors have quickly understood that seeing an object work in a narrative or in a video where it appears banal convinces more than a functional prototype. And it is to be feared that this technique of narration by the object is recovered for marketing purposes. It is tempting to make a "product placement" in a future presented as desirable.
Bastien Kerspern cites a store "99cents" that hosted an experiment of
this type in the United States. This store belongs to a chain where
entry-level items are offered at a single price. Among the
items, the designers have added products with credible design,
packaged in cellophane
cellophane and put them on sale. A package that contains nothing offers you to
refill the
("don't run out of vacuum"), others promise a
genetic test
self-administered.
Interactions with the population are essential. They can be through the object, but also through a stroll through a city. Thus Design Friction played the role of guide in a town with stops around installations that invited them to project themselves twenty years later, in a world full of sensors. The facilitators asked a few questions that stimulated the imagination and decentered people, to help them think: "I imagine I am a sensor, what am I monitoring?" or "I am an evil genius and I have sensors, what am I looking for?"
Design Friction also designs provotypes. This neologism refers to a prototype that aims to provoke thought. These are most often objects put into a situation, but Bastien Kerspern also gives us the example of a pitch in the entrepreneurial style made with the complicity of the CNIL, the national commission for information technology and freedom in France.
The provotype that probably impressed the most consists of a watch, soulaje, that its wearer freely programs to give himself death. The watch then counts down 24 hours before executing the decision, to allow the person to reverse the decision. The watch exists, the poison is materialized... Handling this object is undoubtedly more impressive than reading its description.
Another designer, Simone Rebaudengo imagined a few years ago a society living in fear of contamination. The surgical mask becomes an obligation for all. How to show its feelings? The designer conceived a system of smiley faces directly installed on the mask. Here again the vision of this object, which could be commonplace in the near future, provokes us and incites us to debate!
The friction design does not just play the social nightmare card. Bastien Kerspern talks about a gray area. We are rarely in the utopia, but we are not in the dystopia like "Hunger games" or "1984" either. Sometimes, we even project ourselves into a desirable future. Thus, with the decisive ones, the designers produced the posters of a museum of the future which would keep the memory of the sexism in the sport. In a near future, in a society where equality rules, a museum would show in the form of curiosities that gender equality has not always been respected. At the same time, designers have circulated collectible stickers in the effigy of female footballers, as there have been for a few decades for men.
Design fiction or friction often explore the world of the digital, of generalized surveillance, of data that circulate and are stored like treasures. These methods with multiple variants illustrate all the interest of an approach based on objects and debates to stimulate the imagination and to express its values and vision of the world. The site presents the approach, the manifesto and many examples. The podcast... in which Bastien Kerspern participated also offers many links, to discover and deepen this approach.
The discomfort created by these artifacts, which seem real but do not fit well into our environment and values, also encourages humor and the expression of an imagination that would not be satisfied with extrapolating the present.
Illustrations: Frédéric Duriez
Resources
Design Friction - Medium - Design Fiction as a Modality for Negotiating Socio-political Transformations - article published in 2017, accessed February 7, 2021.
https://medium.com/design-friction/protopolicy-le-design-fiction-comme-modalit%C3%A9-de-ne%CC%81gociation-des-transformations-sociopolitiques-5eb06c41270
Dessein- drawing on podtail.com - Frictional design, interview of Bastien Kerspern by Laure Choquet-
https://podtail.com/fi/podcast/dessin-dessein/dessin-dessein-ep22-fiction-partie-3-design-fricti/
Frictional design- accessed February 7, 2021 - http://design-friction.com
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