In Halo (Halo, the Ark, Shield Worlds) and Destiny (the Citadel, the Black Garden, the Traveler), these structures have all instead been produced by post-scarcity societies. Notions of traditional economies, resources, labour and industrial processes have become obviated by the rise of technologies – generally unseen but implied – that allow for the trivial reshaping of matter, and the creation of new forms of matter impervious to traditional attacks, architectural norms or structural physics. The Forerunners from Halo, who built its great architectures, are a classic post-scarcity SF society: a culture that has moved ‘beyond’ money and finance, and can manipulate matter so easily and readily that the economic concerns of lesser civilisations seem almost comical. This shows us the imaginations of writers considering the development of future technology, what directions this technological development might take and how they might contribute to an eventual move beyond the traditional material economics that have inevitably dominated human life up to the present day. They also suggest an even bolder concept: that the very idea of an ‘economy’ is a phase, a point in the technological trajectory of a civilisation that will, eventually, cease to be relevant. Past a certain point matter is so plentiful and the ability to reshape that matter so trivial that economies cease to exist, and building the planet-sized or solar-system-sized structures in these games becomes only a question of time invested, not resources and effort. In other words, anything can be built in such societies, whether a single hand-held item, or a manufacturing plant for manufacturing manufacturing plants that, in turn, manufacture entire worlds.
Games and the Architectural Imaginary
Literature, film and television have long since portrayed megastructures and the economies behind them. In literature we see Iain Banks’ Culture civilisation, which eschews natural planets in favour of living upon ringworlds and vast wandering spacecraft; ‘Bolder’s Ring’ from Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee series, a black hole stretched across millions of years; planet-sized machinery left behind by the ‘Shadows’ in Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space series, to aid other civilisations in contacting parallel realities; the arcologies of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy and much of cyberpunk since, which are vast urban agglomerations within self-contained habitats; and the ‘Needle’ in the Doctor Who expanded universe, a light-year-long structure upon which entire civilisations have risen and fallen without ever encountering one another. In film and television, we might look at the similarly massive arcologies of near-future Los Angeles in Blade Runner, including the iconic pyramid of the Tyrell Corporation; the massive mining ship Nostromo in Alien, dragging hundreds of millions of tons of ore across the galaxy; the famous Death Star of the Star Wars franchise; various structures from Star Trek, such as the Borg Cubes and Borg Spheres; and the ‘Tet’ or ‘Tetrahedron’ from Oblivion, a vast tetrahedral spacecraft housing a malevolent alien intelligence masquerading as a friend of the human race. Many of these, we must note, sometimes blur the lines between a ‘megastructure’ and what we might call a ‘megavehicle’, as do several of the megastructures in the games outlined here. Nevertheless, literature and cinema have shown a strong interest in depicting the massive edifices that might be created by future societies, drawing on those we already see and extrapolating to portray societies with greater technology, stronger economies and new forms of manufacture and material manipulation.
Despite these many portrayals, of which the above list contains only an incomplete selection, it was not until the advent of science fiction computer games that players could move beyond seeing or imagining what designers or writers specified, and begin to actually explore these megastructures. Players in these games walk through architectures and spaces that make any biological organism seem insignificantly tiny, and into which even the largest real-world human structures would fit a dozen, a hundred or even a million times over. These structures are not just buildings or ‘vehicles’ but are often the sites of entire societies, entire political structures or entirely unique self-contained ecosystems. Many contain extensive detail, from large-scale overall shape and design down to individual laboratories in Black Mesa, rooms and buildings in the Mass Effect Citadel or caves, rivers and individual trees that dot the planet-sized Haloes. These allow for designers to imagine the strangest of future spatial topographies and the systems they create or enable. Just as real-world human-built architectures (on the micro level) and global geography (on the macro level) have profound influences on global ecosystems and political and social behaviour, these towering architectures and entire artificial geographies show an understanding of this syndrome, and an examination of how spaces shape life, war and interaction.
In turn, rather than relying on the reader’s imagination or the particular shots designed by a cinematographer, games instead allow players to walk through these structures, to look at them from many angles and to spend their time how they see fit, exploring the civilisations and economies that created them. This is not always the case, of course, as in some games these megastructures are just ‘background’ images drawn by the game designers that cannot actually be stepped into, but in most cases these megastructures are interactive, or at the very least play a major part in the game’s narrative or thematic elements. This shows the unique potential for games to create megastructures. Massive virtual worlds can be built and explored through which players can experience the physical manifestations of SF economies: megastructures constructed through slave labour, techno-scientific investment and post-scarcity technologies. Games represent a rich opportunity for the imaginations of designers about the economies and megastructures of the future to create their ideas in tremendous detail, and to allow those who consume their media to more fully experience these spaces.
As I suggested earlier in the chapter, these three dominant models – slavery, techno-science and abundance – tell us much about the concerns and anxieties of the game designers who create these megastructure worlds. In the first instance, concerns about the power of technology to contain, constrain and control us are certainly not new to science fiction; in computer games they offer easy narrative hooks to pitch the player against these oppressors, and to create great systems of economic-technological control the player might battle against. In the second instance, perhaps few events have generated as many outpourings of popular and fictional concern as the technologies and technological controversies of the Cold War: nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the space race, industrialisation and environmental destruction, new military technologies, and so forth. The games that explore techno-scientific megastructures take some of these further to their ever more monolithic conclusions, and explore how else the Cold War could have played out, or what other technological worlds might have been created from such outpouring of human ingenuity, and the conflation of economy, science, military and industry. In the third instance, techno-utopian predictions and fictions have existed since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution – and, depending on what we define as techno-utopian, since long before then – and these post-scarcity worlds must be understood in that same vein. They represent not just an optimism for technological ‘progress’ but also a critical enquiry into where such progress might take us, and how economic life might be fundamentally reshaped.
Games have therefore demonstrated their tremendous value as an imaginary medium, and one that brings the viewer into a far closer relationship with the fictional setting being depicted. Exploring these structures can take the form of a kind of dialogue, in which the architectural imagination of the designer and the physical actions and choices of the specific player combine to create unique experiences of navigating these mega-architectures and the purposes for which they were built. In the future of games, it seems likely that we will see an even greater range of megastructures depicted than those considered in this chapter. An increasing volume of games are becoming ‘open-world’ experiences in which the player is given a massive virtual space to explore with a high degree of freedom, which is a high-lev
el gameplay structure well suited to the navigation of colossal digital architectures; equally, many other games use modern graphics processing and rendering technologies to create worlds whose size and scope is immense, even if the player’s progression through those worlds remains relatively linear. Games offer the opportunity to make these megastructures not just background settings for narrative drive and action, but entire worlds to be experienced by viewers and players. In doing so they inevitably hypothesise about what economic forms could possibly underpin these titanic structures, whether slavery and technological control, techno-scientific state and military investment or post-scarcity matter manipulation, and allow for an exploration of these science fiction economies and how they might shape the worlds around them.
1L. Penwell & J. Nicholas (1995) From the First Pyramid to the Space Station: An Analysis of Big Technology and Mega-Projects, paper presented at AIAA ‘Space Programs and Technologies’ conference, Huntsville, AL, 28 September.
2C. Fiori & M. Kovaka (2005) Defining Megaprojects: Learning from Construction at the Edge of Experience, paper presented at ASCE ‘Construction Research’ congress, San Diego, 5 April.
3J. van der Westhuizen (2007) Glitz, Glamour and the Gautrain: Mega-Projects as Political Symbols, Politikon, 34(3): 333–51.
4A. van Marrewijk (2005) Strategies of Cooperation: Control and Commitment in Mega-Projects, M@n@gement, 8(4): 89–104; see also N. Bruzelius, B. Flyvbjerg & W. Rothengatter (2002) Big Decisions, Big Risks: Improving Accountability in Mega Projects, Transport Policy, 9(2): 143–54.
5Penwell & Nicholas, From the First Pyramid to the Space Station; van Marrewijk, Strategies of Cooperation.
6A. Haider & R. Ellis (2010) Analysis and Improvement of Megaprojects Performance, paper presented at EPOS ‘Engineering Project Organizations’ conference, South Lake Tahoe, CA, 5 November.
7Bruzelius, Flyvbjerg & Rothengatter, Big Decisions, Big Risks.
8Penwell & Nicholas, From the First Pyramid to the Space Station.
9C. Jones (1981) Small Is Powerful, Technology Is Art: The Growth of Supertechnologies in the 20th Century, Futures, 13(1): 51–62.
10Penwell & Nicholas, From the First Pyramid to the Space Station.
11D. Roberts (1995) Egypt’s Old Kingdom, National Geographic, 187(1): 2–43.
12L. Penwell (2006) Global Identity and the Superordinate Task, in E. Klein & I. Pritchard (eds.) Relatedness in a Global Economy: 124–48. London: Karnac Books.
13U. Lehrer & J. Laidley (2008) Old Mega-Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(4): 786–803.
12
Economic Design Fictions: Finding the Human Scale
Bastien Kerspern
In this chapter, design is envisaged beyond its role of packaging innovation to become a discursive tool fostering debates on inventing new economics by considering an experiment led by the studio Design Friction.1 I first build on the notion of design fictions, meaning fictitious artefacts challenging prejudiced beliefs, to understand, from a theoretical standpoint, what economics could benefit from this specific posture, especially when bringing a human scale to these complex future systems. Having described these inputs, I then develop a proposition of a blueprint to construct Economic Design Fiction. This framework is meant to assist a co-creation process between stakeholders, whether or not economists, and designers in order to produce economic design fictions as materialisations of speculative economic systems intended to be discussed. With this blueprint in mind, a case study is reviewed involving actual economic-oriented design fictions built in order to test and evaluate the potential of such approach when questioning the purpose of new economic paradigms. In concluding, we look at the limits of Economic Design Fiction, extrapolating on further iterations and improvements that could be brought to this undertaking.2
Designing Fictions and Frictions
Design, in all its forms, has always been tightly interwoven with economics. Today, even if it is driven by the pressing needs of productivism, consumerism and innovation, more and more designers are orienting their practice to engage the political. Design Fiction is one of these attempts to speculate on preferable perspectives, tweaking cultural, social and, more especially, economic beliefs.
Design Fiction is not a widespread posture among designers. Drawing from reflexive research questioning the design practice, Design Fiction relies on a problem-finding approach rather than a problem-solving one. The latter has established its dogma in the entrepreneurial culture, and design thinking has been a major asset in the race to ‘make the world a better place’. It comes with recurrent injunctions to produce changes and even break things, as stated by the emblematic Silicon Valley gurus. Problem-finding, on the contrary, is all about understanding complex situations before attempting to fix anything that might even not be broken in the first place. It calls for intricate questions on the interinfluencing tensions between technologies, social issues and political ideologies. By switching from problem-solving to problem-finding, design fictions are no longer addressing a facet of a problem but are investigating the very structural issues of a situation.
Across their projects, designers step back and start to consider the bigger picture: are we solving the right problem? Or are we accelerating or crystallising existing negative externalities? To achieve this ambitious journey, Design Fiction is frequently inspired by input from different fields of expertise, such as ethnography, engineering and economics.
The problem-finding posture of Design Fiction looks at our near futures, focusing on emerging issues and the evolution of current status quos. The whole point of this initiative is not to predict tomorrow, but to be able to anticipate systemic challenges and stakes.
Extrapolating on weak signals, Design Fiction agitates social imaginaries as well as the realms of possible utopias and dystopias inhabiting these imaginaries. It acts as ‘compasses rather than maps’,3 to open and foster discussions related to changes. In this sense, Design Fiction tells of new trajectories and alternative possibilities.
At this point, Design Fiction shares similar ground with strategic foresight, futures research and even science fiction. It is, in fact, a complementary approach, as design takes benefits from its aptitude to translate questions into concrete scenarios and products. By the use of diegetic prototypes aiming at suspending disbelief towards changes’,4 design fictions are objects materialising worlds and not just stories. They work as ‘provotypes’, meant to be provocative prototypes, semi-functional products embedding critics and speculative values to challenge recurrent status quos. In order to make speculations experiential and to overcome the traditional pitfalls of fiction, Design Fiction shows serious arguments as seen previously. Designers are crafting compelling and believable scenarios. In their speculative productions, they keep in mind their aspirations for technical feasibility, but also the criterion of desirability and viability.
The purpose of Design Fiction is to resort to thought-provoking scenarios and prototypes that do not focus on implementation but, rather, on discussing ‘What if?’ scenarios with stakeholders. The following example demonstrates an actual case when designers have worked with multidisciplinary teams in devising on socio-technological futures, with an emphasis on economic renewal.
ProtoPolicy’5 is a diptych of design fictions looking at the future of ageing in place. This experiment, carried out by the studio Design Friction and several British universities, raised the questions of assistive and invasive technologies. Two provotypes were designed and confronted with the thoughts of public policy-makers and civil servants: Soulaje, a self-administered euthanasia wearable; and the Smart Home Therapist, a counsellor trained in reconciling elderly people with their connected domestic appliances. Through its scenarios, ProtoPolicy especially addressed the economic stakes behind ageing in place with speculations on elderly employment, the impact of the silver economy and the struggles of the healthcare system.
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nbsp; As highlighted by this example, design fictions, through representing abstract ideas and challenging the status quo, are revealed to be an unexpected help when inventing the economy of tomorrow.
Why Design Fiction Matters for Economics
Could design fictions have the capacity to make concrete and experiential the implications of possible larger paradigms shifts in the economy? When rethinking the economy, there is, more than ever, an urgency to consider the human scale. Economics is part of our daily life, but it is regarded by many as an abstract concept. The human scale is about making new economic perspectives tangible, relatable and ready to be debated beyond a community of experts. To do so, Design Fiction suggests three levers with which to bring in the human scale when reinventing the economy: everydayness, ambiguity and discussion.
Everydayness
Designers embed their visions for alternative futures in mundane artefacts challenging our imagination. In a similarity with the prevailing practice of industrial design, practitioners focus on everydayness as the scale of intervention. Future objects allow us to materialise speculations, but they begin to be fully relatable when they are connected to the daily life of stakeholders, notably when it comes to dealing with perplexing notions. Having this concept of everydayness in mind, Design Fiction contributes by defining and then designing for the ‘new normal’,6 to use the terminology of Anab Jain, from the design studio Superflux.
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