Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

5. A Methodological Playground: Fictional Worlds and Thought Experiments

69 A METHODOLOGICAL PLAYGROUND 5 . A ME TH OD OL OG I CALPLA YG R O UnD : F I C T I OnAL w O RLDs AnD TH O UGH T E X PE R IMEnTs The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise. 1 Although design usually references sculpture and painting for material, formal and graphic inspiration, and more recently the social sciences for protocols on working with and studying people—if we are interested in shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be—we will need to turn to speculative culture and what Lubomír Doležel has called an “experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise.” 9808.indb 69 9/23/13 5:48 PM 70 CHAPTER 5 Speculating is based on imagination, the ability to literally imagine other worlds and alternatives. In Such Stuff as Dreams Keith Oatley writes that “[i]magination gives us entry to abstraction, including mathematics. We gain the ability to conceive alternatives and hence to evaluate. We gain the ability to think of futures and outcomes, skills of planning. The ability to think ethically also becomes a possibility.” 2 There are many kinds of imagination, dark imaginations, original imaginations, social, creative, mathematical. There are also professional imaginations—the scientific imagination, the technological imagination, the artistic imagination, the sociological imagination, and of course the one we are most interested in, the design imagination. fictionAl WorldS As Lubomír Doležel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” 3 Once we move away from the present, from how things are now, we enter this realm of possible worlds. We find the idea of creating fictional worlds and putting them to work fascinating. The ones we are most interested in are not just for entertainment but for reflection, critique, provocation, and inspiration. Rather than thinking about architecture, products, and the environment, we start with laws, ethics, political systems, social beliefs, values, fears, and hopes, and how these can be translated into material expressions, embodied in material culture, becoming little bits of another world that function as synecdoches. Although rarely discussed in design beyond the construction of brand worlds and corporate future technology videos, there is a rich body of theoretical work in other fields dealing with the idea of fictional worlds. Probably the most abstract discussion is in philosophy where differences between the many shades of real, fictional, possible, actual, unreal, and imaginary are teased out. In social and political science the focus is on modeling reality; in literary theory it is on the semantics of the real and nonreal; in fine art, make-believe theory and fiction; in game design, literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses. 4 For us, the key distinction is between actual and fictional. Actual is part of the world we occupy whereas fictional is not. 5 9808.indb 70 9/23/13 5:48 PM 71 A METHODOLOGICAL PLAYGROUND Of all these areas of research, it is literature and fine art that offer the most promising sources of inspiration. They can push the notion of fiction to the extreme, going well beyond logical worlds and more pragmatic world building. Although technically a fictional world can be impossible and incomplete, whereas a possible world needs to be plausible, the limit for us is scientific possibility (physics, biology, etc.) everything else— ethics, psychology, behavior, economics, and so on—can be stretched to the breaking point. Fictional worlds are not just figments of a person’s imagination; they circulate and exist independently of us and can be called up, accessed, and explored when needed. The artist Matthew Barney has created extraordinarily complex fictional worlds. His Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) consists of five feature-length films and hundreds if not thousands of individual artifacts, costumes, and props. But although beautiful and exquisitely detailed they are also idiosyncratic to the extreme, an externalization of his own inner world that can only be aesthetically appreciated by others. 6 It is art at its purest—noninstrumental, personal, subjective, and profoundly beautiful. Designers, too, have experimented with fictional worlds...