At some of the extremes of powerful writing, representing some of the richest imagination of the future, there are a few things to be learned about the practice of future-making. One is that being radical and different is not, by itself, what makes visions of these sorts compelling—they work because they are connected to everyday, known realities and the social world we currently inhabit. Another is that, however important human-centered design is, it’s possible to productively start thinking about the future from the standpoint of specific materials and technologies. Finally, we can have positive or negative ideas about the future, and about the implications of our technological developments, and all of these ideas can be valuable.
The term “design fiction” only dropped in 2005 in Bruce Sterling’s book Shaping Things and was first treated in detail in 2009. It refers to a speculative, imaginative practice, which might be expressed in writing, video, live demos, prototype objects, or in other ways. Design fiction is explicitly involved with exploring the future, and with ways to better live in society and culture. The focus is not on coming up with solutions to today’s problems using today’s technologies, materials, and social configurations, but on looking ahead.
Developing design fiction may take the form of writing or video production, but it is essentially a design practice, even if undertaken by thinkers without formal training as designers. So it makes sense to begin by understanding what characterizes design and what the status of design is in our culture.
Here’s a concise definition of design by one of the most famous American designers, Charles Eames, given in a 1972 interview which the Eames office made into a film: “One could describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.”1 This remains an important definition; for instance, it was quoted by Julian Bleecker in his foundational work.2
Without getting into the details of different design processes, designers address purposes and solve problems. They do not always do so by producing a new object of the expected sort, ready to replace an old one. For instance, a standing desk may solve the problem that typically calls for a better chair without any new chair design being part of the solution.
It is a mark of quality for something to be designed or made by a designer, as with designer jeans and furniture. Of course jeans that aren’t designer jeans were also designed, but we don’t believe them to be designed as carefully, intentionally, and expertly. Design is concerned with how these jeans look, and how stylish they are, as well as how they feel to wear, just as an architect is concerned with how usable and inhabitable a building is as well as how it looks from various vantage points.
Design is certainly considered better than a lack of design, but what about the relationship between art and design? There are prominent people, including artist/designer John Maeda, Head of Design and Inclusion at Automattic, who do not spend much time distinguishing between art and design. But many people, including those who work as designers, artists, or in some cases both, do distinguish the practices. Eames’s second answer in his interview is to the question “Is design an expression of art?” to which he replies, “I would rather say it’s an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art.”3
Artists do not have clients to whom they are accountable in the same way that designers do—although of course gallery owners, curators, collectors, and those awarding commissions do fulfill somewhat similar roles. Perhaps a better articulation of the difference is that, as Eames says, designers work to solve preexisting problems and toward preexisting purposes, whether they are creating a functional and visually pleasing teapot or communicating a message effectively on a poster. While the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a prominent design collection and they and many other galleries and museums now display design objects alongside so-called “fine art” works, making art is certainly widely considered the higher-status practice in the United States and globally, and is venerated in many contexts.
Without trying to fully define what fiction is, the relevant aspects of it for the concept of design fiction are that it is a systematic imagination. Someone writing a fiction has to somehow have in mind a fictional world, corresponding to ours in some way and different in other ways, that is developed through imagination. Since design is also systematic and not isolated to a particular chair or other object, there is actually a rather obvious connection between the development of fictions and the process of design.
We could expect, then, design fiction to be more focused toward purposes and problem-solving than fiction is generally. Design fiction also makes the important connection between the systematic thinking of both design and fiction. This is a reasonable way to distinguish design fiction from the utopian writing of Edward Bellamy. Looking Backward provided a compelling and important view of a better society, but Bellamy did not realize his speculative society in as fully systematic a way as a practicing designer would, demonstrating how this society was designed, and how its problems had been solved, in detail. This is one reason the initial appeal of his ideas may not have been longer lasting.
If there were such a thing as “art fiction” that attempted some of the aspects of design fiction without the attention toward a particular purpose, it would be differently focused than design fiction, proposing visions and impulses rather than specific rearrangements of elements that allow for new types of social life.
I believe the Futurists were involved in this sort of future-directed, but more diffuse and less specifically directed, art fiction. Their excitement about technology, industrialization, and war was made manifest in their writings and in other forms of art, and was coherent and systematic in some ways. Also, they did embrace the technological media systems that were consistent with their attitudes. But technology simply exhilarated them; they did not distinguish between any types that could be better or worse for particular people or purposes. They did not propose to develop technology in particular new ways in their work; they simply celebrated how it hurtled toward them.
Design fictions can be in any medium, and some of the most famous have been presented as videos. A standout corporate production of this sort is the 2011 video A Day Made of Glass, which lasts five and a half minutes and was followed up by a series of videos, all created by glass manufacturer Corning, Inc.4 By early 2017, the video had been viewed more than twenty-six million times, more than five times as many views as the original Futurama exhibit garnered.
The video depicts glass surfaces of different sorts that can serve as digital displays and, in a few cases, can also darken to block out light. By showing a day in the life of a couple, which uses glass computer interfaces extensively, it proposes a future in which people are free to move their computing-based work and media, currently tied to particular devices, freely between surfaces.
In the video, the interface to everything becomes visual and involves touching glass. Even a woman’s search for clothing, at a store where she would typically be able to feel the different garments when first looking though them, is conducted through a glass interface, through the navigation of menus. The woman is also greeted by name by a Minority Report–like system (my reference is to the 2002 film], from almost a decade beforehand, which recognizes her as she arrives to look for clothing. In this video, unlike in the earlier movie, the recognition of the customer is treated without irony.
Of course, there are never fingerprints or smudges on any of the glass surfaces. They serve both as the surfaces of furnishings and as fluid interfaces. At the end of the video, we see that the traditional paper book has replaced with a glass ebook reader, although the couple’s bedroom still has a few nonglass items, such as three paintings. Some say that when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When your only product is glass, it seems that every problem can be solved by this product. In Corning’s video, the glass is more than half full.
While every aspect of A Day Made of Glass may not end up defining our future, it’s worth noting what Corning has done well and what contributed to the successful reception of this video. The video is a slick production, of course. The company shows how Corning products will be integrated into many aspects of life—work, communication with family and coworkers, and leisure time—and how people of different ages will interact differently. (One of the girls in the family selects and resizes a virtual photo on the refrigerator and playfully draws on it, for example.) The video shows glass functioning in standard and well-known ways, regulating light, keeping the elements out, providing the structure of a countertop or table. And, of course, it extends the role of the material into new sorts of more pervasive computer display and interface. While the vision is striking, then, it isn’t truly radical in that it does not require that we revise our notions of daily life or of computing. Rather, it extends existing facilities for work, shopping, and home life beyond what we typically imagine.
The same could be said about the Futurama exhibits and about Bellamy’s utopian Boston, but A Day Made of Glass makes the case, dare I say, clear:
Beyond this, there’s a point that resonates with Bel Geddes’s Futurama:
In Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, during a discussion of love, he briefly mentions not being able to see as well as we later will: “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” as it is rendered in the most influential English translation, the King James Bible. While the passage is about an encounter with the divine, to some it recalls Plato’s allegory of the cave and the way that people in that imagined environment saw shadows rather than reality. To others it evokes the difficulty of seeing the future. The phrase has been used directly or in altered form as the title of many works dealing with the future, usually in dystopian ways. Among these are Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner, Darkly, a 1977 science fiction novel with autobiographical aspects that was made into a 2006 animated (and rotoscoped) film by Richard Linklater. In it, there are several things that are difficult to see: a confusion of identities produced by a “scramble suit” that makes the protagonist look like many different people in rapid succession, for instance, and the matter of who is undercover and working for the police. Besides the many references to this phrase, more than a dozen literary and musical works, and almost as many TV episodes, use the phrase “through a glass, darkly” as their title directly.
Scholars seeking to understand what type of “glass” is meant in this verse have looked through the dark glass of ancient writing and determined that it is probably a mirror, and several recent translations of the bible use the term. So, one reason we might be looking through a glass darkly would be because we are looking at a black mirror, for instance, such as the mirror-like surface of our mobile phone when it is turned off, or sleeping.
The television program Black Mirror is an anthology science fiction series, similar in format to The Twilight Zone. Each episode is its own story with its own cast, the themes and genre of the series providing the only connection between them. The format is an old one, and a somewhat antiquated one, extending back to the golden age of radio in the 1920s. Few recent TV shows have used the anthology format; one of the other shows that has is Fargo, a crime comedy series, similarly dark, which is based on the Coen Brothers’ film. But the anthology format is, for the most part, a throwback.
While the format is a retro aspect of Black Mirror, the episodes are united in being set in the future, a near future with recognizable contemporary technologies such as the smartphone, social networks, and virtual reality taking a prominent place—an exaggerated place, that makes for a satirical result. Black Mirror generally presents stories, and worlds, that can be understood as dystopian. They are a type of no-place, a species of utopia, which offers an example of how bad things can get if we let our worst habits and practices continue to grow, and if we continue to develop and use technology uncritically. A few of the episodes do not have the horrifically negative endings that typify the series, but these episodes, too, are involved with questioning technology and exploring its consequences through presenting a world that does not exist, at least, not yet.
To concretely discuss the image of ourselves that Black Mirror provides, and how the series works to do this, I’ll focus on the first episode released after Netflix took over the series. (The first seven episodes, produced 2011–2014, were done in the United Kingdom by Channel 4.) I’m going to give away the ending to this episode, which is about a world in which everyone is getting upvoted and downvoted by others all the time, and in which a person’s status and even their essential personal liberty depend on their rating. If you notice the title of the episode when you start watching it—“Nosedive”—you will pretty much be spoiled already. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that tone of the episode is not as extremely grim as most of the other episodes in the series—the main character ends up humiliated and incarcerated, but is not, for instance, recycled into an energy drink. The ending offers more humor than despair.
The premise of the episode is that everyone, including of course the main character, Lacie Pound, has a rating between one and five that results from other people giving them some number of stars, via mobile phone, either when they encounter them “in real life” or after other interactions. Obviously the ability to indicate ratings in this way is not science-fictional. In fact, a version of the app Peeple, which allows people to rate other people (not just products, restaurants, or films) in exactly this way was released in March 2016. The system depicted in “Nosedive” further relies on general-purpose face recognition to indicate who is being rated. While this would currently be hard to do quickly using only a phone’s computing power, it could certainly be done on a server: commercial software to identify people by their faces is already in place at border crossings, casinos, and even megachurches. So, the plausibility of the basic technology in this episode is pretty much 100 percent—I give it five stars.
During the episode, many characters are involved in service interactions with Lacie, and they tend to act in artificial, extremely polite ways. This is hardly dystopian; it is at most a gentle satire on the systems that society has already set up to compel pleasantness. Lacie seeks upward social mobility and wishes to move into a new house in a neighborhood that is restricted to those of higher status. Again, given the existing barriers of income and getting approved for a mortgage, this situation seems only slightly exaggerated, or shifted so that it is captured by a new, explicit quantitative measure. The twist, however, as the title suggests, is that a few negative interactions in a row can cause a person’s rating to plummet, excluding them from benefits that seemed ordinary beforehand. Lacie finds this out the hard way. She also discerns that even those who are rated very highly (such as a childhood friend who extends, then retracts an invitation to be her maid of honor) appear to spend a large amount of time and effort cultivating their high rating.
One of the usual things about “Nosedive” is that it has an ending that, while certainly negative, is rather comedic. Lacie ends up jailed in a glassy cell opposite another person, a man, who is also well dressed but seems to have fallen on hard times and low ratings. With nothing to lose, they end up yelling insults at each other in a rather exuberant way, seemingly pleased that they get to vent but perhaps also that no one is hurt, physically or in terms of their ratings.
The episode shows us that technology is not always directly to blame, and it may mainly intensify the problematic social urges we already have. Quantitative social ratings may magnify our existing difficulties, but it’s ultimately our being jerks to each other that is the problem. We can imagine the people portrayed in the episode being emotionally hurt and contriving to socially disadvantage others, or attempting to socially advantage themselves, without this rating system being in place. The real statement of the episode is that the social world and the technological world are deeply intertwined, or, as Ted Nelson would say, intertwingled. Perhaps it’s also appropriate that in the episode Lacie speaks to her brother and, remotely, to her childhood friend from her kitchen of the future, where the social and technological mix.
Early on, I mentioned the future-building potential of another science fiction show, Star Trek. Interesting, perhaps, that the most mirror-like episode (“Mirror, Mirror”) presents a view both of the utopian world of the usual Star Trek and of its opposite, an empire dedicated to war that has a similar Enterprise and similar crew members on it. To make decisions about our collective future, it’s helpful to know what can go wrong as well as what can be right. The lessons for future-making, then, are as follows: