How ‘design fictions’ offer growth potential for interaction designers

There’s an old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, but a recent paper from Simon Fraser University researchers suggests interaction designers could use “design fictions” to learn important truths about do-it-yourself environmental sustainability.

In ‘Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices,’ (R. Wakkary, A. Desjardins, S. Hauser, L. Maestri), the authors explore the way “green” bloggers and their audiences are taking inspiration from professional sustainability projects and making them their own. For example, vegetal walls that make some buildings cooler and absorb water can be highly complex and expensive, but that doesn’t stop the green DIY crowd. They substitute materials like recycled wooden pallets to create similar walls in their gardens or homes, and use processes that may bear little resemblance to those used by the experts.

This underscores the power of “design fictions,” a term that is still new in the Information Architecture (IA) field but which the paper refines as “narratives, prototypes, and concepts that project a design idea represented in a future situated action.” Much in the way science fiction can represent a vision of what might one day be possible, design fictions can serve, in this case, as a way to make sustainability more possible today.

“Design fictions are generally aimed at an audience of technologists and designers who can reason on how the future can or should be and discuss possible technologies, materials, and the mechanisms involved,” the authors write. “However, green enthusiasts see these design fictions as possible futures that are accessible for immediate re-imagining and construction. For green enthusiasts, design fictions are like any existing design object, therefore they become a source for interpretation and adaptation into a new and immediate DIY project.”

The paper suggests designers can create products that assist DIY projects, or facilitate collaboration between professionals and everyday people. It also raises the idea of an emerging “hybrid practice-oriented designer,” who would think like a do-it-yourselfer but create the kinds of instructions or templates that create new innovations. And perhaps most critically, the authors say this hybrid practice approach could apply in areas far removed from environmental sustainability, including interactive technologies.

To read the full 58-page paper, which is being published in ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction, click here.