Design Fiction Works
Research with colleagues at Simon Fraser University (2012 - 2015)
I have been interested in Design Fiction for a while and worked on several projects around the topic. Here are some examples.
A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices
In 2012 we began writing a journal article called “A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices” in which we propose opportunities for designers to co-design with DIY enthusiasts, targeted as practitioners in their own right, designing toward or within a design fiction. We see design fiction as a possible means to bridge sustainable practices, interaction design, and practice-oriented design and as a source for interpretation and adaptation. Designers can take on an intermediary (or what we call hybrid) role between design fictions and sustainable DIY practices. For example, Malthus is a DIY home version of aquaponic farming (see images). It was designed by the firm Conceptual Devices. The project aims to show how to build an aquaponic farm with accessible and easy to assemble materials. In this case, the designer is not presenting a design fiction in itself, but a plausible prototype of a proximate future. Below see the published journal article and the project page about the Green DIY study. This project was done in collaboration with Ron Wakkary, Audrey Desjardins, and Leah Maestri.
Wakkary, R., Desjardins, A., Hauser, S., & Maestri, L. (2013) A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). 20, 4, Article 23 (2013). (34pgs). [PDF]
See also the project page of the Study of Practices of Repair and Green DIY.
SFUture – A Sustainable SFU in 2065
In the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 terms I took a class called ChangeLab and the final project of my project team was to envision and share what SFU (our University) could look like in the future, considering sustainability issues. We created a design fiction of SFU in 2065 in form of documentary-style videos from the future. There is a Youtube Channel, a tumblr blog, and a publication about this project. We had several probes that were things in our design fiction like the unscissors and the nogfobber (see images). My project partners were Audrey Desjardins, Kashif Pasta, and Mike Funergy.
See the four other fun SFUture videos HERE.