- Right, apologies for the screw up at the start, there.
I'll just dive straight in, so, I'm Joseph Lindley.
I'm a doctoral student at Lancaster University in the UK.
My coauthor is Paul Colton, who's
Professor of Speculative and Game Design also at Lancaster.
Today I'm talking about creating and publishing
research papers that were entirely made up.
So, this is pushing design fiction to the limit.
Now, you might ask, "what fictional research papers?"
Well, one thing we're worried people
have been thinking is that, what's represented here,
that we're just making up research, because
research is actually difficult.
Well, research is difficult, but
actually, we hope there's something more to this,
and there's actually a useful kernel of knowledge in there.
The way the presentation is set up
is really mirroring the paper, itself.
Like the train it's just a gratuitous metaphor,
there's a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In the beginning, we offer just an
introduction to design fiction,
a kind of related work section.
Our review is particularly broad
and tries to cover the breadth of
design fiction and HCI all together.
By the middle, we go into an overview
of one particular way of using
design fiction and HCI called imaginary abstracts,
which was introduced a couple of
years ago by Mark Blythe.
Then we describe and explore game of drones,
which is a example fictional paper.
By the end, we contrast imaginary abstracts
with fictional papers, we highlight some
apparent strengths and weaknesses,
and we do that in order to finally
advocate for fictional papers.
Finally, we note some questions that this work has raised.
Before anything else, I just want to
address what design fiction actually is.
We'll get to a bit more of a formal
definition shortly, but in plain English,
I would say that design fiction is
just a type of speculative design, and
speculative design intends to explore yet-to-be
realized concepts, ideas, and or technologies.
It tries to understand the future.
And design fiction does this speculative
designing in a particular way.
It does it by creating fictional worlds.
And these fictional worlds contain
prototypical concepts.
HCI researchers, as is you'll see, with some
of the stuff on the screen here, have
embraced the concepts and applied it in
a whole range of different ways.
Our related work section at the start of the paper
tries to explore some of these approaches
in order to, mainly to establish the breadth
of design fiction practice in HCI.
Just a few quick examples here,
there are projects that center entirely
around the production of a design fiction
prototype or a design fiction artifact.
These projects have much in common with
other research through design projects.
One example is this short paper and film
from NordiCHI 2014 that I was involved in.
The work offers insights about
artificially intelligent interfaces, and
the insights are mainly derived by reflecting
on the making process and on the finished product itself.
This is one way of doing design fiction in HCI.
There's also projects that use design
fiction mainly as a workshop tool.
I would say it's a way of facilitating
ideation to unpack and explore new ideas, and
this relatively well-cited paper in the field
is one such project.
There's several examples in the corpus of HCI
design fiction where it's used as a critical tool.
In this mode, we can say design fiction
is maybe used as a stimulus to generate
data or develop critical insights
from which findings can be derived.
This one is an example that's critical
of gadgetry designed for animals with things
like the Litterbug, the cat-a-log, and EmotiDog.
If you haven't seen it, I would check it out.
Design fiction can also be an output
for a more traditional project.
Speculative designers can encapsulate
research findings into a new design fiction.
In this example, the original study
was a kind of ethnographic study and
the output was a series of design fictions,
one is shown on the right, and these
were made in the form of kind of product advertisements.
Finally, the related works section acknowledges
the fact that design fiction exists
entirely independently of academia and HCI.
It's practiced by corporations, artists,
and design-houses amongst other people.
And just to reflect on the related work section
a little bit before I move on, it's there
to showcase the diversity of how design fiction
is practiced, demonstrating its flexibility.
But, then also to acknowledge that design fiction
is what I'm saying is pre-paradigmatic.
The understanding why it's used, how to do it,
and even to succinctly define what it is.
All of those things are often quite
problematic in how to express, so please,
bear that in mind for the rest of the presentation.
On the issue of definition, the paper refers to
Bruce Sterling's frequently cited phrase,
design fiction is the intentional use
of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.
In this definition, diegesis is usually
considered to mean storyworlds, as I labeled here.
Sterling's definition works great, but
I just want to add that in our 2015 British HCI
paper that calls for clarity around communications
to do with design fiction, we offered an alternative.
We say that design fiction is something
that creates a storyworld which has something
being prototyped within it.
And, that definition might seem
somewhat vague, because something
in both instances can mean literally anything.
It might be the something that
creates a storyworld is a piece of prose,
or a film, or a art installation,
or anything, maybe a academic abstract, or a paper.
And the thing being prototyped within it,
could be anything from a data input device,
a display, a new type of vehicle, or even a whole policy.
So, it can be something that's doing something, or anything.
I labeled that as well.
The flexibility is purposeful, it
allows us to articulate that things
like abstracts, or whole papers,
can be the thing that creates the storyworld.
And that the prototype concept or interface
described by that is the thing being prototyped.
It also avoids the somewhat tricky philosophy
that surrounds that notion of diegesis
in Sterling's definition.
Now, I just want to get on to the
middle section, imaginary abstracts.
These are a particular type of
design fiction that's tailor-made
for HCI research, or HCI researchers, and
the term was coined by Mark Blythe
in a 2014 CHI paper.
These abstracts report findings from
studies that did not take place, and
it's suggested that as part of a
research through design project,
imaginary abstracts might be a means
of reflecting on what could be
learned through a prototypes development.
I say, it's a prototype prototype, if you will.
Mark went to some lengths in his
original paper on this topic to analyze
a corpus of literature.
And the purpose of that was to ensure
that the imaginary abstracts, the
fictional abstracts, would appear real.
So these imaginary abstracts mirror
real research through design abstracts.
Now I'd say in spite of the lengths
gone to to make those design fictions
believable and accessible, Mark still
acknowledges that the crazy concept
he's introducing requires a willing
suspension of disbelief from the reader.
Even when they're made to look real,
abstracts for research prototypes
that are fictitious, the whole thing's clearly
challenging, and this paper that I'm presenting
to you now introduces a slightly different
proposition that I think is a logical
extension of this notion of imaginary abstracts.
Rather than limiting yourself to
writing an abstract, how about writing
a fully fictional paper.
How would that differ?
And to re-quote Mark's words about
imaginary abstracts, Please bear with me,
while I talk you through our example
fictional paper that's called game of drones.
Now the first thing to note, when
we refer to fictional papers, is we're
not suggesting that the paper itself
does not exist, rather that the content
in the paper is part of a story.
The text itself is real, while what
the words describe is a fiction.
So this fictional paper is called game of drones.
It's a short paper that I and Paul
wrote in 2015 and we submitted to
CHI PLAY's work-in-progress track,
where it went through a peer review process
A slightly lighter peer review process
than the full CHI conference, though.
Now, to tell you the story, the paper,
it describes a prototype system where
quadcopter drones are trialed as part of
a gamified civic enforcement initiative.
Users score points by catching
fellow citizens who park illegally or
allow their dogs to foul on the streets.
They catch them by piloting these drones around remotely.
The paper does various things.
It writes up details of the trial, including
who the users were, who the people
involved in the trial were, what hardware was used.
We had to rewrite UK legislation
to make the trial feasible in terms of legality.
We designed some landing stations,
which you can see around the middle
of the poster there.
We designed some signage, considered
the data protection policies.
There's a whole load of stuff that
didn't make it into the paper, fake data
and graphs, and things that I created.
The paper does describe itself
as design fiction.
It informs the reader that the
whole project was not real, however,
interestingly it does that at the
very end of the paper.
Also, this video was submitted with it
demonstrating what such a system might look like.
Now, just before I go into a bit more
detail on it, I want to note that
game of drones isn't the only example of
a paper that's entirely fictional, but
you'll find archived in the ACM digital
library as part of CHI.
The kerminator entails CHI in the Future
Robot Enslavement of Humankind: a retrospective,
is another example of one whose
content is entirely made up.
It differs from game of drones, though,
game of drones is actually quite boring, the paper.
It's cold, it has no humor in it, and
it's somewhat somber.
It's trying to be as objective as possible, or
appear as objective as possible
for something that's made up.
Whereas the robot enslavement paper, well,
it's written by a team of robots and
features people like Ben, the Kerminator, Kerman.
While it's clearly a bit more interesting and
a bit more exciting, it's got that long
word in the keywords, I don't know what that means.
But, both papers are equally unreal, but
game of drones is intentionally masquerading as reality.
But, why?
The robot paper is trying to be critical of something.
But what's this fictional paper
that's trying to appear real trying
to do, what's the point in it?
The simplest way to explain that,
is to refer to a quote at the end of game of drones.
I'm gonna read through it for you,
but it's up on the screen too.
The research in this paper and the
associated artifacts are part of a design fiction.
Therefore, while this paper presents
a fictional account of plausible future HCI research,
it's purpose is not only to highlight
the potential usability or utility issues such
systems might present but also to create a
discursive space in which researchers can
consider the wider societal and ethical issues
of technological futures in which drones might
be widely adopted, but then, it finishes with,
in future publications we will consider the effectiveness
of this design fiction in addressing such challenges
and design fiction more generally
as a method for exploring issues
related to introduction of technologies.
Now, it's the note about future work
that I think is the most significant.
The future work that we refer to there
turned out to be this paper I'm presenting
to you now, and this paper advocates
for the creation of fictional research papers
like game of drones, and to do that as a means
mainly to explore practical issues about
the introduction of a specific technology
but also about wider societal and ethical considerations.
A practical example with game of drones that
Paul just mentioned to me before I came up here is
maybe game of drones is, on a practical level, a
response to Amazon Prime adverts where you see
these drones landing outside a beautiful
house with a beautiful couple and somehow
delivering a product.
That's a way of trying to look at the
future of quadcopters but it's not really
very useful or realistic.
We'd like to think that what we went through
is a bit more, a bit closer, to what might
actually happen and a bit more useful
as a way of interrogating the future.
Now, just to move away from the game of drones
things for a second and back to the more general
point of this paper, I need to make it clear that
writing fictional papers and then writing
a real paper about the fictional paper, in doing that
we're not simply doing the equivalent of rolling
tires across the desert, which
my girlfriend Lydia is doing here.
There is a point.
The closing passages of the paper compare
the relative properties of imaginary abstracts
with fictional papers.
We aim to leave the reader with a compelling argument
for why creating fictional papers can
actually play a key role in further, or
a role in, further empowering HCIs burgeoning
design discourse as we think imaginary
abstracts do to.
I'd love it if you all go and read the paper,
and in particular read the conclusions of the paper.
I'm trying to sum it up here, but
it is very difficult, I'm afraid.
The most significant contrast between
the fictional paper model and imaginary abstracts,
is an element with some kind of deception.
Imaginary abstracts confirm their fictional status up front.
They tell the reader first, game of drones
on the other hand, and perhaps other fictional papers
applying the same model, only inform
the reader at the end about the fictional nature of it.
The deception also relies on the fictional paper
including the fullest possible picture of the
storyworld, or the diegetic landscape, as possible.
In doing so, it puts a burden on the author
to go to some considerable lengths to
think through the details and in fact,
to properly design elements of the system.
In our case, we designed the landing stations,
the legislation, the signage, and
a few other bits and pieces.
But that burden on the author is paid back to the reader.
It almost entirely removes the requirement
for them to suspend their own disbelief
and instead allows them to become part
of the magic circle, or in fact,
doesn't allow them, it almost forces
them to because they're not being
told they're being deceived.
To look at the inverse side of that equation,
imaginary abstracts place a burden on the reader.
They do have to willingly suspend
their disbelief and put effort into
immersing themselves into the storyworld.
However, the creation of the design
fiction is significantly less onerous
for the author, perhaps making abstracts
a bit more of a quick and dirty
way to create a design fiction, let's say.
It's a lot easier, I would say, and not that they're
completely easy, I don't want to offend
Mark, or anyone who's done them.
The notion of a paper that's submitted
to a real venue but is in fact fiction
clearly opens up a ethically dubious space.
Is it okay to intentionally deceive
the reviewers and the readers.
Is it okay for the deception to end
in a work that's almost entirely fiction
being archived alongside other real research?
Regardless of the answers to those questions,
I'd like to think it's safe to assume
that design fiction does have a place
in HCI research, and the number of
design fiction papers at this year's conference,
I'd like to think, supports that.
If the strength of these fictional papers
are to be harnessed without undermining
research ethics and rigor, then the
conversations must happen about how
to create, review, and publish this kind of work.
We need to establish conventions.
Just to leave you with a few final thoughts,
in the paper reflecting on our own work,
of course, writing it third person to protect
our anonymity, we honestly point out
that fictional papers are, putting it colloquially,
taking the piss.
Using more slang, in the review process,
one reviewer wrote, "at moments the
"paper seems to fold in on itself,
"sometimes a satire of its own existence
"in a sort of self-satisfied fog of academic wankery."
It's reassuring that despite having this
belief, one that I think I and Paul probably share,
even though it's our own work, that the
reviewer still saw value in the work
and gave it a good score and it finally ended up here.
In our rebuttal, we promised that real
people would turn up to do the presentation.
So, I've attempted to be as real as possible,
although reveling in its own anarchy,
which again is something that one of the reviewers
mentioned, and pushing the boundary of an
already-weird practice even further,
we hope that the paper shows that
there really is a case for creating
fictional research, however, there is
clearly more work to do if this
kind of approach is to become a
normal feature in future CHI conferences.
The conversations about employing
fictional papers in real HCI research
I hope start in earnest here, or
continue in earnest here.
Thank you very much, and now, like
reviewer three, I'm going to disappear
in a puff of logic, and maybe
take a few quick questions if there's time, thanks.
- [Master Of Ceremonies] Thank you, do we
have anyone wanna ask a, yes we do.
- [Elizabeth] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Buie
from Northumbria University.
Mark Blythe is my primary supervisor
and I've worked with him on imaginary abstracts,
Joe knows this, but the audience doesn't.
I just wanted to say I've thought all along
that imaginary abstracts are kind of a start
to developing a fiction and yes, they are easy.