Frenectomía

In the midst of my early and exploratory Design Fiction research, in 2014, I watched the science fiction movie Her. In the weeks that followed, a series of discussions with colleagues Dhruv Sharma and Robert Potts led the three of us to embark on a piece of work which culminated in a research paper being presented at the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) on a topic which we called Anticipatory Ethnography (Lindley, Sharma and Potts, 2014). This particular project is rather different to the majority of the other research in the thesis and would classify more—to borrow from Frayling’s much fabled categorisations of design research (Frayling, 1993)—as research into Design Fiction rather than research through Design Fiction. Because this work is completely theoretical, and has no element of practice within it, I describe Anticipatory Ethnography in this chapter rather than in the case studies section of the thesis (however, in the case studies section there is an account applying this technique, see 4.3 An Ethnography of the Future). It may appear in opposition to normal protocol to include research conducted as part of the doctorate, within the same doctorate’s literature review. However, I do feel the paper proposing Anticipatory Ethnography has a place in this literature review. One reason for this is that the Anticipatory Ethnography paper has attracted ample citations, suggesting some wider relevance or interest to Design Fiction practitioners, and as such, it is of relevance to this literature review.

The Anticipatory Ethnography argument involves casting design ethnography, as well as the design endeavour itself, as forward-looking processes which have the potential to develop a complementary synthesis. Further, design ethnography and Design Fiction have a deep appreciation of situated action (cf.

Suchman, 1987) at their core, and thus another commonality is revealed. Exploring the consonant means by which design ethnography and Design Fiction derive their value reveals the potential for a mutually beneficial symbiosis which is a product of their synergetic ‘forward-lookingness’ and inherent dependence on situativity. The resultant proposal, is that Design Fiction might provide an opportunity for ethnographers to extend the temporal scope of their research practice, addressing ethnography’s tendency to ‘privilege the status quo’ (Crabtree, Rouncefield and Tolmie, 2012, p. 170). Design ethnography, although agile in comparison to more traditional anthropological inquiries, has rarely found means to be entirely unshackled from the present moment in time. Meanwhile the sometimes-naive practice of Design Fiction could arguably benefit from the industrial gravitas of design ethnography by inheriting the rigorous and long-lived anthropological roots of ethnography, and perhaps most importantly from a well-developed methodological toolkit.

Figure 3. Tabulated properties of Anticipatory Ethnography and its constituents.

From this starting point the paper develops several rhetorical arguments for why Design Fictions may be seen as reasonable sites to try and apply the data gathering and analysis techniques of design ethnography (Lindley, Sharma and Potts, 2014, p. 243). This is achieved by comparing, contrasting, and suggesting connections between various aspects of each practice. With the argumentation structure established for why this looks like a fruitful thing to do, the paper progresses to speculate about possible ways to actually practice Anticipatory Ethnography. These are referred to as ‘modes’.

Three modes were proposed: studying the process of creating a Design Fiction; studying how an audience interacts with or perceives a Design Fiction; studying the content of a Design Fiction. Any of these places may be a site from which (anticipatory) ethnographic data may arguably be gathered. In order to exemplify how each of these modes could work we invoked a concept I termed ‘incidental Design Fiction’ (see 2.3.3.4). These incidental Design Fictions share the properties of a Design Fiction, without actually intending to be one. Making the case for Anticipatory Ethnography the movie Her is referred to in this way in order to articulate how each of Anticipatory Ethnography’s modes might happen in practice.

To study the process of creating a Design Fiction one could either observe or interview producers, writers, set designers, and cinematographers, etc. Their experiences of crafting the diegeses of pieces such as Her, hypothetically, would provide a rich dataset relevant to the specific future contained in the film. The

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concept appeared to be supported by quotes from Her’s production staff, for example: “When something felt weird, when Joaquin was uncomfortable with something, I knew it meant there was some place I had cheated or hadn’t thought through or hadn’t gone deep enough. His flinch is always worth listening to.” (Harris, 2013). The second mode, studying an audience interaction with a Design Fiction was inspired from the practice of audience ethnography (Pastina, 2005). There are a variety of techniques that could be employed, through from the simplicity of interviewing audience members after watching the movie, through to diary studies, generating scenarios, and accompanied viewing (Quirk et al., 2008). The third mode proposed studying the content of a Design Fiction, and involves researchers directly engaging with the movie itself and attempting an ethnographic study of the diegesis. There was never any intention to be prescriptive about how would be the ‘best’ way to do Anticipatory Ethnography, however, in terms of accessibility ease, this final mode seemed intuitively to be the most practicable option of the three. Later I will describe the experience of doing ‘An Ethnography of the Future’ by putting this third mode of Anticipatory Ethnography into practice, as well as the production of Care for a Robot (see 4.5)—a project which, although not an example of Anticipatory Ethnography, was directly inspired by Anticipatory Ethnography.

In summary, the Anticipatory Ethnography thesis lays out an argument for using the ideals of Design Fiction as a way of looking, as a lens. It’s about applying thinking derived from Design Fiction in order to frame and articulate why and how insights about the future may be developed.