Hello, everyone. I’m Bowen Kong,
a Ph.D. student from the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.
Thank you for your interest in my presentation. I’m going to give a talk on an experiential
inquiry to contribute a phenomenological understanding of design fiction.
Design fiction has increasingly been recognized in the design research community.
This creative approach has shifted design research from problem-solving
to discussing the future people want. Our work sees a challenge that aims
to better understand the inner felt aspects of practicing design fiction.
Just like when we read science fiction, we discuss characters, worldview, etc.
But the premise of these discussions is that we have "experienced"
those fictional worlds through reading. In other words, novels not only give people
the opportunity to discuss the future but more importantly, they let us experience the future.
Similar views have also been raised by Bardzells. They reviewed Mark Weiser’s essay. Bardzells
argued that science fiction demonstrated a new way of thinking about the lived experience of ubicomp
rather than only projecting a conceptualization of technology.
For the Neuromancer in the new Chinese version republished in 2019, we held a design workshop
to develop an entanglement experiment of personal photographs with cyberpunk literature,
focusing on the experience of overlapping the real and the unreal.
In the pilot study, we observed that the descriptions in Neuromancer are of two types:
common descriptions and cyberpunk descriptions. Common descriptions resemble our everyday
life and strong cyberpunk sentences describe special names of equipment, places, characters,
or scenes. We found that the sentences that contain both types are the most suitable examples
to entangle daily life with a fictional world. Moreover, we found that the personal daily
photos are evocative to bring personal memories back and sufficiently vague
to associate with sci-fi texts. We selected the Neuromancer quotes
that have an “opening part” describing everyday phenomena followed by a fictional
description evoking a Neuromancer impression. And these sentences were divided into two types
of cards including 120 opening sentences and 86 main sentences. We conducted a three-hour workshop
with 15 participants, grouped into 5 teams. All the participants had read the first
two chapters of Neuromancer and had basic knowledge about design fiction.
We instructed the participants to upload their daily photos.
In the workshop, each group was given a deck of cards, and each participant had three A4
worksheets to record the photos and sentences. The keywords on the back of a quote card allowed
the participants to select the appropriate contents from the hundreds of quotes.
We identify two major phenomena: imagination and entanglement.
Imagination indicates that the photograph only worked as an
illustration for ideation, and entanglement shows that the personal experience was entangled.
An entanglement experience focuses on transforming the participants’ actual-world experiences.
When memory finds a similar context in science fiction,
the experience of “imaginary and truthful” would also be given to the fictional world,
similar to overlap with reality. Therefore, the entanglement enables
intimate speculation that makes the fictional world come alive.
And further, the fictional world plays an active role in affecting
the feel of the real space in reverse. In such an overlap, imaginary contents
were not just an element designed by the participants from a God’s-eye view;
instead, they felt involved in a hybrid world and driven by the “possible existence”.
We summarized the “phenomena of imagination and entanglement.
In ordinary brainstorming, a fictional world is imagined as a separated world projected by
human beings situated in the actual world. Entanglement could be understood as parts
of the actual world overlapping with a fictional world, such that
human beings might have a sense of getting implied by the perceivable agency of the fictional world.
To sum up, our study intends to put forward the following contribution:
Poetic insights into how the boundaries between real and fictional can be blurred in design.
A technique for creating an entanglement experience as design fiction.
A new approach to understanding ‘fiction’ as one of the nonhuman things
that can have agency within an OOO. That’s all I want to show you
about the experiential inquiry for design fiction. Thank you very much for your time.