BEPULJANG Blog
What is Speculative DesignPart 4

Props That Make You Believe: Design Fiction

How do you make a future that doesn't exist yet feel real? This piece looks at the diegetic prototype borrowed from film props, how design fiction works, and how its language was absorbed into advertising.

#Speculative Design#Design Fiction#Prototype#Futures

Talk about the future rarely feels real. A sentence that begins with “In 2040…” makes sense to the mind, but it doesn’t reach the body. In the previous piece, I talked about why we explore the outer edge of the cone, but if the futures we explore can’t be put in front of people, the debate never begins.

This is where design fiction comes in. It’s about how to make people believe: for speculative design to work, it first needs a setting that makes the people who encounter the design believe in it.

A Concept Borrowed from Film Props

The term was popularized by the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. He used it in his 2005 book Shaping Things, and later defined it as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”

The definition contains two unfamiliar expressions. “Suspension of disbelief” is the attitude we take when watching a film or similar medium: we know something doesn’t make sense, but we go along with it for a while. “Diegetic prototype” is a term from David Kirby, who studies the relationship between science and film. Diegesis means the world inside a story. So a diegetic prototype is a futuristic technology that appears as if it actually works within the world of the story.

It’s easy to picture a scene where a character in a film uses some device casually. When it’s used like an everyday object, with no explanation and no wonder, the audience accepts the world in which it exists simply as a premise, before asking whether the technology is necessary or believable.

In a 2009 essay, Julian Bleecker brings this idea into design practice. If films make us believe in the future through props, then designers, who are the people who actually make the props, can do the same. In other words, props can carry our imagination of the future.

Not a Product, but a Fragment of a World

The charm of design fiction is that it doesn’t paint a grand vision of the future directly. Instead, it makes a small, ordinary fragment that could plausibly have come out of that world.

The TBD Catalog by the Near Future Laboratory, which Bleecker co-founded, is a good example. It’s a booklet modeled on an in-flight shopping catalog, but instead of introducing future technologies, it presents itself as a product listing from a world where those technologies have already become commonplace. The moment an imagined technology appears not in an article that spotlights it but as an everyday discounted item, the viewer can take in the fragment of the future the designer imagined more realistically, and feel it.

Introduction to the TBD Catalog, Near Future Laboratory (2014)

Another example, Sascha Pohflepp’s 2006 work Buttons: Blind Camera, is an object that actually works. This camera has no lens. When you press the button, instead of taking a picture, it shows you a photo someone else took and shared at the same moment. Even before hearing any explanation, holding it in your hand makes you think about what it means to take a picture, and to own one.

The principles common to these examples can be summed up in roughly three points.

  • Build a plausible context rather than perfect function. Borrow everyday formats such as user manuals, receipts, and customer complaints.
  • Don’t make the technology the protagonist. Show how people live alongside it.
  • Leave just enough strangeness. Too absurd, and people turn away; too familiar, and it reads as just another product mockup.

Focusing on the Question, Not the Technique

But this method has a trap. The power to make people believe isn’t used only for asking questions. Unlike the intended purpose of raising questions and drawing out speculation, a misused technique can end up as a mere display of imagined futures, or as an advertisement.

In a 2020 piece for MIT Technology Review, the journalist Tim Maughan traces this process. One of his examples is Corning’s 2011 A Day Made of Glass. In this video, every pane of glass at home and on the street becomes a touchscreen. Its form resembles design fiction, but a critical stance is hard to find.

A Day Made of Glass, Corning (2011)

There’s an even more ironic case. In Superflux’s 2015 short film Uninvited Guests, an elderly man outwits the smart devices that monitor him. Maughan points out that a 2019 Amazon Echo ad resembles this film, except that in the ad, the devices are welcomed. The same grammar delivers the opposite message.

In the end, the test is probably what the prop leaves behind. If what remains after seeing it is “I want one,” it’s an ad; if what remains is “Is it really okay to live like this?”, it’s a question. Of course, there’s a wide gray zone between the two. But just as the palm and the back of the hand are close yet can never be the same, the two may look alike and cause confusion, but if we stay focused on the original purpose, questioning and speculating about the future, we can avoid falling into the trap.

In the next piece, I’ll set theory aside for a while and look at actual works. Some slightly strange objects will appear, such as a battery charged by corpses and a clock that eats flies.

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