A thesis about design fiction
Creators: name: Lindley, Joseph Galen
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2018
Subjects: design fiction

description: This research began as something else. Originally, I sought to research
      the possible futures of cryptographic currencies, and I encountered Design
      Fiction for the first time when assembling a methodology for that project.
      I was enticed by the rhetoric around Design Fiction and the aesthetic of
      works describing themselves as Design Fiction. However, as I researched
      the concept more thoroughly it quickly became apparent that grounding an
      entire doctoral thesis on Design Fiction alone may be problematic due to a
      lack of consensus around what Design Fiction really is and how it works.
      Hence, my doctorate pivoted, and rather than using Design Fiction to
      research another topic, I elected to research Design Fiction itself.
      
      Through desk-based research into Design Fiction the thesis establishes
      that while there are some central notions which seem common to Design
      Fictions (e.g. a concern with ‘the future’, the use of ‘design’, and a
      flavour of unreality invoked by the term ‘fiction’) there is little
      consensus around how these notions should be defined, how they interact
      with each other, and what—in concrete terms—the nature of the practice
      that emerges in the space between them really is. Responding to the
      apparent lack of consensus the thesis explores the following questions:
      
      • What is Design Fiction? 
      
      • What can Design Fiction do? 
      
      • What are the best ways to achieve that?
      
      In order to explore such fundamental conundrums—and guided by Bruce
      Sterling’s succinct assertion that ‘the best way to understand the many
      difficulties of design fiction is to attempt to create one’—my responses
      to these questions were developed using a Research through Design
      methodology to inform a series of ‘material engagements’ with Design
      Fiction. These are articulated through a series of ‘case studies’. Each
      case study uses Design Fiction to explore a different technology or
      context. These include cryptographic currency, robotic carers, drones, and
      artificial intelligence. Together the studies create a portfolio of
      material engagements with Design Fiction that, collectively, underpin
      contingent responses to the research questions.
      
      The thesis concludes that Design Fiction is a type of ‘World Building’
      that may be utilised in many different ways, for example as a
      communication tool, as an ideation aid, or as a research method.
      Furthermore, the underlying intentionality of any given Design Fiction
      must be expressed through appropriate media in order to support World
      Building that is sensitive to both the given domain’s attributes and the
      factors motivating the use of Design Fiction in the first place. While the
      Research through Design approach applied in this research aspires only to
      produce contingent and temporary answers to the research questions, those
      answers come together as a set of usable and accessible insights useful
      for unravelling, understanding, utilising Design Fiction, while fostering
      the practice’s ongoing maturation and adoption into its own near future.