Amortiguamiento de Rayleigh 61 

The precise provenance of the term Design Fiction is slightly unclear and while coinage of is usually attributed to Bruce Sterling in his 2005 book Shaping Things, Sterling himself said that it was Julian Bleecker who “invented the interesting term”7_{. In Shaping Things (a book about products, the environment,}

machines, and gizmos) Sterling uses Design Fiction in order to delineating between science fiction’s “hand-waving hocus-pocus” and a contrasting style of writing that, although dealing with fictional things (i.e. stuff that is made up), “makes more sense on the page” (2005) or, in other words, has been designed. The fact Sterling used the term in this way, along with his pedigree as a Steampunk author, underline the fact that Design Fiction is a relative of science fiction. However, I believe that Sterling’s original use of the term, and what Design Fiction has subsequently become mean that Design Fiction’s intents and

7 _{This quote is taken from a Wired article. Sterling, B., 2013. Patently untrue: fleshy}

defibrillators and synchronised baseball are changing the future. Available at:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/play/patently-untrue [Accessed March 3, 2014].

purposes tend to have a different quality to the more cultural and entertainment focus of literary or filmic science fiction. As Sterling put it, Design Fiction “sacrifices some sense of the miraculous, but it moves much closer to the glowing heat of technosocial conflict” (ibid). Those few sentences in Shaping Things seem almost certain to be the evolutionary antecedents of Design Fiction8_{, but, evolution is the operative term and what the practice isnow has}

moved through and beyond what it was then.

After Sterling’s (arguably laissez-faire) coining of the term, the next significant marker is Julian Bleecker’s ironically titled short essay on Design Fiction (the PDF version of which is 97 pages long—albeit with quite a lot of images). Bleecker describes his view of Design Fiction both through the words on the page, but also via the space between them. First, it’s worth noting that although Bleecker has an academic background, this essay is not ‘academic’ (depending on how you define that). For instance, it is not peer reviewed (although it seems likely that in practice peers, colleagues and friends contributed). Neither is it published by a journal, within the proceedings of an academic conference, or even by an academic institution; rather it was self-published online9_{. Citations}

in the essay are diverse, and references to science fiction seem as relevant as academic ones.

“[The essay is] not meant to be an all-encompassing exposition. Instead I look at a few examples with some insights to go along with them. It is less a theoretical statement and more a travelogue of experiences.” (Bleecker, 2009, p. 15)

The effect though, is powerful. Extremely evocative, Bleecker’s essay is a masterpiece of rhetoric and also reflective of somebody who is clearly very smart and has something interesting to say. While it remains logical and coherent throughout, he seems to have taken care to write with a poetry which never tries to over specify what Design Fiction is but still provides a wealth of practical and sensible conceptual jumping off points for what it could be. All the while Bleecker inspires a feeling of concrete confidence that Design Fiction has ‘arrived’. Bleecker’s paper is but one step in a more elaborate sequence of events, which, together comprise this brief history of Design Fiction. Hence, I do not want to go too deep into the interior of the almost nebulous range of material that is covered. I will, however, include a few notes on key texts that he refers to and some pivotal themes.

8 _{I note that Blythe identified an earlier use of the term in 2003, but, this seems to be a}

separate and distinct evolutionary strand to the Sterlingian one, from what I can tell (Blythe, 2017, p. 5404).

9 _{It’s interesting to reflect on the merits of academic publishing traditions when looking at this}

paper. I muse around whether its freedom from the constraints which come hand-in-hand with academia’s “self-preserving giants” (cf. Lindley, 2013) is one of the key reasons why it has been so influential.

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Bell & Dourish’s paper “Resistance is Futile”: reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous computing (2014) is of note because—as Bleecker describes it—it is a “gutsy” proposition. The gumption that these two influential researchers had was to write and publish a paper that compared and contrasted the “real” science of ubiquitous computing research with the “imaginary” worlds of science fiction. Their conclusion is that the two things are mutually beneficial. They argue that ‘good science fiction’ is acutely aware of science, much of the ‘good science’ is acutely aware of fiction. For the swashbuckling Bleecker, of course, they didn’t go far enough. He believes that ubiquitous computing research is science fiction10_{. Bell & Dourish make it clear that they}

don’t share Bleecker’s extreme position, although whether they make that assertion because they believe it, or to avoid “ridicule and those nasty peer review notes” is not clear (2009). Bell & Dourish’s paper, although relatively straightforward in its rhetorical structure, clearly plays an important role in Bleeker’s formulation of Design Fiction. The following suggests that Bell & Dourish was the inspiration:

“I came to the conclusion that there was a practice there, just at the contours of their [Bell & Dourish’s] essay that may as well be called ‘Design Fiction’” (Bleecker, 2009)

Where Bell & Dourish’s contribution was an inspirational pivot-point around Bleecker’s identification of Design Fiction as a potential practice, David Kirby’s research into Hollywood’s relationship with science provided a foundational construct that helps describe how one might start to make sense of the practice by understanding its constituent parts. Kirby’s key contribution was the concept of the diegetic prototype. Bleecker’s precis of diegetic prototypes goes thus:

“a kind of technoscientific prototyping activity knotted to science fiction film production […] The prototype enlivens the narrative, moving the story forward while at the same time subtly working through the details of itself” (Bleecker, 2009).

Kirby’s research, which mainly involved interviews with Hollywood insiders, as well as reflection on a wide array of cinematic examples, underpins Bleecker’s position that fact follows fiction, fiction follows fact, and hence the two swap properties (Bleecker, 2009). In an array of filmic examples Kirby identifies how the portrayal of yet-to-be-realised technologies in (fictional) films can have a direct impact upon perceptions of how the real versions of those technologies are perceived when they arrive at a later time (i.e. fact follows

10 _{A position I identify with and that is reflected in a paper I co-authored, ‘Implications for}

Adoption’. The paper’s argument is that much HCI/Ubicomp research shows novel technical implementations, these derive their value by leveraging the implicit assumption that one day they might be adopted. In other words, this assumption is a speculation. Given the centrality of this speculative element to HCI/Ubicomp research, then there is a strong argument for making the speculation explicit. The paper proposes HCI researchers routinely do that, and do so using Design Fiction (Lindley, Coulton and Sturdee, 2017).

fiction). In a compelling example relating to artificial hearts and the film Threshold, he suggests that the process by which fictional films alter reality rests on the fiction’s ability to establish the necessity, normalcy, and viability of a given technology. Producing this effect necessitates a semblance of reality at the core of the otherwise unreal depictions of technology. As was the case with Threshold and a number of other examples Kirby cites, if a fictional technology is presented (within a given film’s inner world, or diegesis) as necessary, normal and viable, then it may well have a demonstrable effect on real perceptions of that technology, encouraging people to see it as necessary, normal and viable in reality. In the cases Kirby identifies these effects emerge best through interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists, engineers, designers and film producers/directors in order to balance scientific fact, plausibility, believability and storytelling (Kirby, 2010).

Kirby calls these technologies that are not-really-real but do really-change-real- opinions, diegetic prototypes. ‘Diegetic’, from diegesis, is not a term in widespread use, but in the sense and context Kirby employs it, it’s invocation makes a lot of sense. Film scholars contrast diegetic elements of the production—whether they be sounds, dialogue or visual elements—with their non-diegetic counterparts. Whilst diegetic elements are part of the world depicted in the film (i.e. the fictional otherworld where the story takes place), the non-diegetic elements are foreign to that world and, in practice, are usually added for dramatic effect. For example, in the opening sequences of the film Saving Private Ryan, an army advance up a heavily defended beach during the second world war. The sounds of engines, bullets, soldiers shouting, and wind are all ‘real’ insofar as they exist within the reality of the film. Hence those sounds are diegetic. However half way through the opening scene music is introduced. The soundtrack augments the blood and guts of the diegetic war scene, layering on top of it the unavoidable reflective melancholy of a sensitively deployed orchestral score. The sound is used in order to help tell the story evocatively, however, for our purposes that is not the point. What the point is, is that within the reality of the film there was not an orchestra on the beach; nor there a radio or grammar phone on the beach playing back the music mechanically; nor, funnily enough, does music spontaneously erupt from the midst of bloody battles. It is a non-diegetic element of the film; it does not exist in the interior world of the film. Given that film and television are media that the majority are completely au fait with, most viewers rarely trouble themselves with distinguishing between diegetic and non-diegetic elements, or even being aware of the distinction11_{. Returning to Kirby, however, the term diegetic}

prototype refers to blueprint technologies which appear within the internal reality of filmic worlds.

11 _{With that said cannily hoodwinking audiences by merging diegetic and non-diegetic}

elements is a widely utilised directorial technique. For example, this clip of the Simpsons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz48peiGn5w shows music we expect to be non-diegetic, is actually part of the world, and inversely Quentin Tarrantino’s use of diegetic music where we might expect non-diegetic music, e.g. this clip from Jackie Brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs9dhMZA7Uo. Apparently Tarrantino only ever uses diegetic music in his films.

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“Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage even over true prototypes: in the fictional world – what film scholars refer to as the diegesis – these technologies exist as ‘real’ objects that function properly and which people actually use.” (Kirby, 2010)

Sterling’s first reference to Design Fiction in Shaping Things was in 2005. Bell & Dourish’s paper was released as a draft in 2007 (it was later published in 2014). Bleecker’s essay arrived in 2009, and while Kirby’s diegetic prototype research was not published until 2010, Kirby and Bleecker had clearly discussed the work prior to publication and it was referenced in Bleecker’s essay12

(Sterling, 2005; Bleecker, 2009; Kirby, 2010; Bell and Dourish, 2014). Traces of how Bleecker’s vision for Design Fiction evolved are revealed in the acknowledgements at the end of the essay; clearly Bleecker’s thoughts were the product of many conversations and contemplations with a vast range of people. Notably Nicolas Nova, ‘co-conspirator’ at the Near Future Laboratory, a group whose practical explorations in Design Fiction have helped terraform the contours of Design Fiction’s landscape (even if that is a landscape which others don’t necessarily agree upon the shape of). The Near Future Laboratory’s work has been hugely influential on the development of the field. Beyond the reputations of the individuals in the group, who carry with them significant gravitas (in a whole host of different expert areas) much of this influence stems from the fact that Design Fiction, underneath all the theory, discussion and rhetoric, is a practice. It involves doing stuff. Hence, if one wants to understand it, then arguably an essential part of developing that understanding is to do stuff and also to look at the stuff others have done.

This brief history of Design Fiction, I think, is best wrapped up with two further anecdotes. First, in 2012 Bruce Sterling gave a brief interview with Torie Bosch, that was published on slate.com. In it, replying to the question, “So what is a Design Fiction?”, he said “It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” Through citation, re-citation, and eventually subsisting without the need for citation at all (in the context of conversations and presentations about Design Fiction), this brief sentence became a de-facto definition of Design Fiction. Although poetic, snappy, and accurate, despite their pithiness Sterling’s words are ambiguous. Although this ambiguity (or lack of specificity, if you prefer to look at that way) is reduced when considering Sterling’s full answer to the question (as opposed to the widely quoted, but abridged version), the ripples resulting from Sterling’s words are still in evidence several years later. The long version of the quote is as follows:

“It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very

12 _{I confirmed this in a conversation I had with David Kirby over lunch when I arranged for}

him to visit Lancaster University to hold a seminar on the content of his book, Lab Coats in Hollywood. He and Bleecker knew each other previously and had gotten to talking about his conception of diegetic prototypes in the same period that Bleecker was formulating the ideas that ultimately made it into the essay.

seriously about potential objects and services and trying to get people to concentrate on those rather than entire worlds or political trends or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.” (Sterling, 2012)

So, in Sterling’s view circa 2012, this is the best definition we’ve come up with— suggesting that he sees space for (perhaps expects) development, refinement and change. Additionally, he puts it quite clearly that in his view “It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories”.

Finally, ‘A Design Fiction Evening with the Near Future Laboratory’ was a 2013 event hosted by IDEO. At that event, 4 years after his influential essay was published, Bleecker quips:

“I don’t think we’ve figured it out […] studying it, understanding it and trying to devise some of the principles - of what we’re calling Design Fiction - is what we’re trying to do.”

Betwixt Sterling’s widely cited, yet inherently ambiguous ‘definition’, and Bleecker’s unabashed but insightful observation that even he hadn’t precisely mapped the coordinates of what Design Fiction really is, at this point in time— the same time I first encountered Design Fiction—it seemed clear that while the general shape of Design Fiction was emerging through the mist, any notion of precise topography was conspicuously missing. Wanderers, hikers, explorers or other prospectors wishing to embark on a voyage on or around Design Fiction, based on this fogginess, should expect the unexpected on their travels.