Enrique Encinas

The Co-ordinates of Design Fiction: Extrapolation, Irony, Ambiguity and Magic

This paper argues that design fiction is a powerful term in part because it is malleable. A wide range of differing design fictions are emerging and we pursue a spatial metaphor to provide a map based on literary approaches. Following Margaret Atwood we trace design fiction back to marvel and wonder tales such as the Arabian Nights through to the science fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We suggest science, magic, ambiguity and irony as the cardinal points of design fiction. We then apply these four different approaches to design fiction to the concept of a divorce app for older people. We argue that currently design fiction is dominated by scientistic and ironic design fiction and suggest that magic and ambiguity are currently under explored.

The Solution Printer: Magic Realist Design Fiction

This paper is presented as a design fiction because nobody would accept these findings in any other form though they are as true as anything else published at CHI. It begins with empirical investigations into the infamous dream simultaneously experienced by thousands of people. We describe the development of a device designed to capture images from that extraordinary dream. This was a prop, or diegetic prototype that unexpectedly began to work. We then report a range of other fictional devices developed at the Solutionist Studio which began to function as described. We argue that the line between fiction and reality has become entirely porous.

Cyrafour: How Two Human Avatars Communicate With Each Other

Human avatars or physical surrogates are becoming increasingly present in leisure, artistic and business activities that seek to augment the sensory richness available to telepresent participants. While a number of studies have focused on how human avatars relate to other humans, little attention has been paid to the particularities of human avatar to human avatar interaction. This paper examines characteristic features of such interaction through Cyrafour, a playful embodied identity game in which two human avatars clone various conversations generated elsewhere. Such cloning, or speech shadowing, seems to allow for an empathic embodiment of the meaning transmitted and appears to create a frame for further discussion on the topics raised. This project contributes to the study of telepresence with new insights applicable to the design and research of human computer and human robot interfaces.

Cyrafour: an experiential activity facilitating empathic distant communication among copresent individuals

Distant communication relies mostly on a non-embodied representation of participants (e.g. textual in chats, photographic in videoconference, auditory in telephony, etc) that lessens the sensory richness of conversational interactions. Cyrafour is a novel activity that explores the implications of using human avatars (cyranoids) for empathic interpersonal remote communication. An unscripted conversation between two individuals (the sources) is transmitted through radio waves and reproduced by two copresent subjects (the cyranoids) following certain conversational guidelines. In particular, the Sources were invited to discuss about a topic, play a conversation game and comment on an opinionated video. All Cyrafour sessions were video-taped and participants interviewed afterwards in order to support analysis and discussion. Cyrafour could be considered as a playful embodied identity game in which cyranoids are simultaneously together in and aside from a conversation generated elsewhere. This puzzling circumstance seems to allow for an empathic embodiment of the meaning transmitted and appears to create a frame for further discussion on the topics raised.

Imaginary Design Workbooks: Constructive Criticism and Practical Provocation

his paper reports on design strategies for critical and experimental work that remains constructive. We report findings from a design workshop that explored the home hub space through imaginary design workbooks. These feature ambiguous images and annotations written in an invented language to suggest a design space without specifying any particular idea. Many of the concepts and narratives which emerged from the workshop focused on extreme situations: some thoughtful, some dystopian, some even mythic. One of the workshop ideas was then developed with a senior social worker who works with young offenders. A digital social worker concept was developed and critiqued simultaneously. We draw on Foucaults history of surveillance to defamiliarise both the home hub technology and the current youth justice system. We argue that the dichotomy between constructive and critical design is false because design is never neutral.

Grand Visions for Post-Capitalist Human-Computer Interaction

The design, development and deployment of new technology is a form of intervention on the social, psychological and physical world. Whether explicitly intended or not, all digital technology is designed to support some vision of how work, leisure, education, healthcare, and so on, is organised in the future [11]. For example, most efforts to make commercial systems more usable, efficient and pleasurable, are ultimately about the vision of increased profits as part of a capitalist society. This workshop will bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore an alternative, post-capitalist, grand vision for HCI, asking what kind of futures the community sees itself as working towards. Are the futures we are building towards any different from those envisioned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, which are typically neoliberal, absent of strict labour laws, licensing fees, tax declarations and the necessity to deal with government bureaucracy?

Making Problems in Design Research: The Case of Teen Shoplifters on Tumblr

HCI draws on a variety of traditions but recently there have been calls to consolidate contributions around the problems researchers set out to solve. However, with this comes the assumption that problems are tractable and certain, rather than constructed and framed by researchers. We take as a case study a Tumblr community of teen shoplifters who post on how to steal from stores, discuss shoplifting as political resistance, and share jokes and stories about the practice. We construct three different problems and imagine studies that might result from applying different design approaches: Design Against Crime; Critical Design and Value Sensitive Design. Through these studies we highlight how interpretations of the same data can lead to radically different design responses. We conclude by discussing problem making as a historically and politically contingent process that allow researchers to connect data and design according to certain moral and ethical principles.

Research Fiction and Thought Experiments in Design

Any design process involves an imaginative act, a picturing of the world as other than it is. Fiction has long played a part in design research in the form of scenarios, personas, sketches, paper based prototypes, simulations, prototypes and speculative design. The term “design fiction” has been recently adopted to describe more elaborate and detailed representations of products and services that do not exist yet. Design fiction is an emerging practice and there are several competing definitions and forms. This article traces design fiction from the Italian radical design of the 1960s through British Art Schools in the late nineteen nineties to contemporary adaptations of the practice by companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Design fiction is now produced regularly by individuals launching Kickstarter campaigns, corporations selling visions of future products and governments imagining new digital services. But there is little agreement about the status of such fictions: what constitutes a good fiction? How does fiction relate to research? In what sense does fiction contribute to existing knowledge? Although fiction can sometimes result in accurate prediction this is not its main value. It is rather the creation of ambiguous artefacts that help us think carefully about emerging technologies and their potential impact. Although fiction may seem to be the antithesis of empirical enquiry it is often employed in the form of “thought experiments” in Physics, Mathematics, Ethics and Philosophy. This article argues that design fiction can also be considered as a form of thought experiment. Excerpts from a fictional Wikipedia article about Valdis Ozols, a Lativian Historian and author writing design fiction in the 1940s precede each section as think pieces about the nature and value of fiction. The text is illustrated with pages from a fictional design workbook written in an invented language.

We-Coupling!: Designing New Forms of Embodied Interpersonal Connection

Positive social and collaborative effects are hailed as a major advantage of embodied and tangible approaches to interaction. This studio offers a hands-on exploration of potentially extreme versions of such benefits Systems and techniques that somehow share or transfer embodiment between two or more people. Through participatory demos, studio attendees will explore and compare a variety of approaches to experiencing the perspectives of another body, and controlling bodies other than their own. These comparisons will be a launch pad for collaboratively combining existing body sharing systems and mocking up new design concepts. By bringing together ideas and approaches in an actionable manner, this studio will share and develop imagination, theory, and skills relevant to the design and study of interactive systems in which the body plays a central role.

Reconstrained Design: A Manifesto

This manifesto marks the first anniversary of a project, Reconstrained Design, launched explicitly to challenge the state of design: its narrowing pathways, prevailing assumptions, and corporate agendas. Taking Our manifesto takes the form of a preamble which outlines the history of the manifesto genre and its origins in the historical avant-garde of a century ago, followed by a list of 12 tenets that put forward specific design challenges (each based on or challenging a thought-provoking quotation)., our manifestoWith this text we aims to pry open new discursive and imaginative spaces, to force new ideas into the public view, to promote engagement with politics, technology and other facets of everyday life, and to upset the status quo of design thinking. With this manifesto,It is written in an appropriately polemical style in order to, we take at its word the call to provocation. We hope this manifesto will establish our projects aims while encouraging important discussions between conference participants.