Ambiguity
Envisaging alternative perspectives, Design Fiction is qualified in tackling controversial themes, to act as a provocation, developing rhetoric on new narratives for production and consumption. Designing speculation is, in itself, a thought-out operation, demystifying the current status quo and revealing hegemonies occurring daily in our societies. This critical posture is mandatory to avoid reproducing ‘flat-pack futures’, a term coined by Scott Smith from Changeist,7 a studio that fuses strategic design and foresight. Fuelled with ambiguity, the process of Design Fiction looks for frictions: what has been taken for granted by economic stakeholders, but is not for a deliberately ignored part of the population. Divergent scenarios are essential in fostering the pluralism of views and voices when economic systems are struggling to overcome their own neoliberal, climate-sceptical or social-xenophobic mythologies.8
One way to experiment with the principle of ambiguity in economic design fictions is by mixing influences and trends that seem to have no direct connections. Scenarios then take unexpected paths. With uncanny products or services, design fictions are an invitation to embrace the weirdness and the strangeness that are part of the new normal. In this way, design fictions cover the blind spots of futurescaping and the grey areas of systemic dependencies.
Discussion
Design fictions aim at triggering discussions beyond the communities of experts. By asking us to think about our expectations for the future, it actually becomes a catalyst to reflect on our considerations for the present.
Using materialised fictions as a starting point for conversation is expected to help to uncover fears, hopes and concerns from non-specialists about systemic shifts. It becomes even more relevant when confronted by a diversity of audiences and cultures. It encourages both spontaneous reactions and structured thoughts on what could be framed as preferable perspectives. How can we go there? How can we head to this preferable direction? Is it really a preferable situation? To whom? Figure 12.1 emphasises this idea of continuous and reciprocal influences between the ‘real’ world and the speculated perspectives.
Figure 12.1 Design fictions set the basis for debates that aim, in turn, to influence our current models
It is a safe bet that discussing our assumptions on how techno-economic changes could affect our everyday life and the broader perspectives of our society will confront our beliefs in the new economy. Design Fiction as a provocative discipline becomes an asset in the decision-making process by showing us uncharted territories and unheard-of reactions.
Appealing for necessary turbulence, these three particular levers from Design Fiction facilitate the objections addressed to monocultures and self-fulfilling prophecies by extending the reinvention of economics to inputs from third parties. Design Fiction seems to be timely in its suitability for the exploration of scenarios associated with heterodox microeconomics. The everydayness lever indeed looks at the daily economic mechanisms in our lives while the ambiguity lever pushes for ideas for exploring ways that definitely do not belong to the field of mainstream economic paradigms. As Design Fiction has mainly been involved in reflecting on issues related to new technologies, however, there is a need to formulate guidelines to orient the process in engaging economic perspectives – thus producing what could be named Economic Design Fiction.
A Blueprint for Economic Design Fictions
Design Fiction is not just a matter of being a designer. For a few years now design thinking has intensively democratised design tools and methods for the entrepreneurial sphere, and even beyond. Design Fiction appears to be a tool for mediation in collaborative world-building experiences and a needed blueprint for building together. The blueprint for Economic Design Fiction aims to facilitate the translation of speculated new economic models into concrete objects for demonstrations and discussions. It consists of two canvases, one to set the speculative context and the other to imagine a product that narrates this alternative universe.
Looking at the Extremes: Scarcity and Post-Scarcity Contexts
A good story needs a good setting. For economic design fictions, a good setting challenges our relation to the law of supply and demand and its possible evolution.
The blueprint offers to set the design fictions in a twofold speculative context: scarcity, with the disappearance of a specific element; and post-scarcity, a situation of abundance. To conceptualise those distant horizons, the starting point is the question of resources, be they natural or artificial, and the related mundane products made of them. As with the considerations for everydayness in Design Fiction, they will act as bridges to think about system changes.
Even if scarcity and post-scarcity might seem unlikely to happen soon, they are useful entry points for pondering our current systems. By playing with exaggerations, these extremes serve as a stimulating and effective basis for creative thought experiments. Radical speculations prevent us from sticking to timorous, pragmatic and short-term visions, which are in the way of real economic ingenuity. More interestingly, they move us to look at the robustness of the components of our economic models and to consider how they behave when stressed in unconsidered situations. How are we going to produce, to consume, to distribute and to sustain in such conditions of discontinuity?
Oscillating between scarcity and post-scarcity as a framework for thoughts is about alternating alternatives, looking at each edge of the spectrum of speculation; thinking how we are at ease with mirroring our fears and hopes for economics, be they utopian or dystopian projections. In this way, the coupling of scarcity and post-scarcity appears to be salutary, forcing us to envisage far-out changes and driving us away from the temptation of replicating faded socio-economic configurations.
The Speculative Context Canvas
The speculative context canvas sets the overall environment, from an economic perspective, for designing new models (see Figure 12.2). It is a matrix modelling the guidelines needed to imagine how key economic components such as production, distribution and consumption might evolve in a situation of scarcity or post-scarcity. To draw the outlines of this newly impacted society, the process starts with choosing a resource and a related mundane product. The product then becomes a manifesto of alternative economic paradigms implied by the radical shift of abundance or shortage. World-building happens through the lens of the product life cycle.
Figure 12.2 The speculative context canvas sets the economic paradigms of the speculated world
The speculative context canvas adopts the following structure.
Resources and Products
This is the starting point of a speculative economic system. It requires defining a natural or artificial resource, renewable or not, as well as a mundane product based or using this resource.
Political Set-Up and Orientation
This is the bedrock of the speculative context. It sets the political background that will influence the economic set-up in which the scarcity or post-scarcity product is going to evolve. It crosses ideological properties, combining the duality of left-wing/right-wing politics with the nuance of authoritarianism or libertarianism. The philosophical orientation completes the ideological system by adding a shared ideal to reach. In addition to the archetypical ambition for continuous growth and responsible degrowth, the speculative world can also opt for stasis, denying any opportunity for expansion and reduction, or transformation, converting its founding principles in unforeseen models.
Modes of Production, Distribution and Revenue
These three modes describe the backstage of the product life cycle and are, at the same time, another demonstration of the existence and influences of new economic paradigms in a scarcity or post-scarcity scenario. They cover all the steps of the history of the selected product, from being assembled to being distributed and exchanged for values.
Each mode is articulated around formal practices (such as subcontracting, recycling or online shopping) and informal ones (think about the black market, corruption, hacking or tweaking).
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Externalities
This last part of the matrix is dedicated to extrapolating how externalities – positive or negative – related to the product are going to be acknowledged, managed or even ignored. Externalities typically include post-consumption, post-production and post-distribution impacts.
The scenery having been set, it is time to design the main prop articulating the whole fiction.
The Speculative Product Canvas
If the speculative context canvas is about establishing the environment for the design fiction, the product canvas is the one laying out the provotype to be discussed. The chosen mundane product needs to be reformulated according to the speculative context, its features, uses and consumers, then changing. These new characteristics of the product are like many highlights of the causes and consequences of new axioms actually remodelling the supply and demand concept. To fulfil their promise of being thought-provoking, however, the prototypes have to work in concert. They follow the principle of a diptych: for each resource, there are two extrapolated outputs, two products, each one embedding the vision of a scarcity or a post-scarcity economic system. By representing both the extremes, the diptych offers points of comparison for exploring in-between scenarios.
The speculative context canvas integrates three axes:
•features of the product (meaning: what it does);
•users or consumers (meaning: who uses it);
•uses of the product (meaning: what it is used for). This last part might sound similar to the features of the product, but it invites us to think about forbidden or unplanned uses.
All three items of the canvas suggest envisaging which elements of the product appear, remain unchanged or disappear in the speculative context when compared to our current object of reference (see Figure 12.3).
Figure 12.3 The speculative product canvas embodies the values and beliefs of the fictitious context in a real-fictional product
This being said, the matrix is just the very basis required to create speculative products personifying a different economic model. It still has to go through a classic design process, going back and forth between ideation and iteration phases to finally deliver a real-fictional artefact. A team of designers, engineers and makers could easily build real and complex prototypes, although other diegetic formats are a matter of interest. Pieces such as fictional newspaper articles, user manuals and promotional flyers are some ‘easy-and-cheap-to-prototype’ options to stage the design fictions or extend the message of actual prototypes.
Neither of the matrices of the blueprint is intended to be used as a strict framework but, rather, to operate as a creative opener to structure inputs and to test the coherence of economics-oriented design fictions.
Case Study: Data, in Scarcity and Post-Scarcity Worlds
Our studio, Design Friction, experimented with this Economic Design Fiction blueprint to create two provocative scenarios intending to collect feedback on this discursive approach. While speculating on situations of scarcity and post-scarcity in data-driven economies, we shared these design fictions with economists as well as with non-experts to evaluate the extent to which such prototypes are able to foster imaginative thinking on the implications of other possible economic systems.
What If Data Were the Key Resource of the Economy?
This is the question that our speculation starts with. The digital economy has proved to be one of the most trending topics among industries and entrepreneurs in recent years, but also a subject carrying persistent myths, despite its relative youth. Almost every sector is now impacted directly or indirectly by what has been termed ‘digitalisation’. Markets tend to rely more and more on data-driven orientations. Data are often mistakenly referred to as ‘the new oil’, regardless of the peculiar limits of the metaphor. It echoes the beliefs and trust placed in algorithms and connected technologies.
Free from the past fears of the planned economy, digitalisation has brought us a calculated economy. The promise of decentralised economies and systems is, for the moment, dominated by the concentrated and private ownership of a few operators, however. Indeed, the digital economy is tarnished by controversies about new gigantic monopolies, the lack of redistribution of values and a rapid pace of growth that is not thought likely to be handed down to future generations. Economic design fictions are then appropriate means for a debate about our expectations for an economy in which we are both the consumers and the products. Interestingly, ‘big data’ and its derivative metrics are also enforcing our insatiable faith in economic prediction, making it a proper choice when it comes to speculating on economic futures.
Our two design fictions will take data as a resource and the smartphone as a related product to explore new socio-economic models being developed in societies varying from abounding with data to having banned them.
The Data Sniffer, a Product for Data Scarcity
In this speculative society, collecting and using personal data for commercial services had been banned after a massive leak of everybody’s private data. Mass protests ensued and governments united in deciding to declare illegal every data-driven business. Data should neither be processed, shared nor stocked by third-party entities for commercial purposes. Economic models based on big data mining have collapsed. On the other hand, socio-economic paradigms that have evolved since the economy of attention have been radically redefined, without any digital application distracting us any more. As a consequence, each former data-based product had been redesigned so as to not share data any more.
The data sniffer marks the great comeback of the mobile phone antenna. As its name gives it away, the reactive antenna looks for electromagnetic signals to point towards the source of data, be it a hidden data centre or an undeclared sensor. As a kind of divining rod, the data-sniffing antenna helps in avoiding specific places linked to the use of personal data. It points out threats to the users, but the device also reports the fraudulent collection or stocking of data to concerned authorities. Concretely, the antenna bends to highlight the direction in which the data hotspot is situated. Basically, the closer you get to the source of data, the longer the antenna grows to refine the location of possible data spots (see Figure 12.4).
In this design fiction, the data sniffer had been stated as a mandatory feature that smartphone constructors have to include in their products, on the basis of legal requirements. The speculative product was introduced through a fictional user manual explaining how it should be operated.
Figure 12.4 In an economic system suffering from data scarcity, consumers could be protected by a smart antenna detecting traces left by banned data-related activities (illustration: Emmanuelle Roulph)
When presented to both economists and online service users, the comments first underlined a possible ‘slowification’ of the world, with real-time data use no longer permitted. The participants highlighted that the disappearance of data-driven systems would accelerate the growth of local markets and insular economic communities. The data scarcity environment was also a convenient occasion for a new economy. In addition, new jobs were suggested to track and report any irregular use of data. New civic incentives would be set up to deal with data as a threat to civil liberties. To ensure this guarantee, human operators would replace algorithms, processing data ‘by hand’ to avoid the possibility of the latter being leaked or misused.
Production settings have also been discussed in connection with the end of digital black boxes. For the remaining attempt to mine and refine data, every procedure would have to be transparent and publicly readable, implying the end of any technological monopoly. In this set-up, all individuals would become their own data heaven and, under very strict regulation, be able to monetise their private data for certified companies or research labs. Interestingly, this context of data scarcity was also the opportunity to point out the likelihood of an emerging economy of fear: the widespread paranoia would have triggered new businesses and regulations tailored to satisfy the desires for privacy.
Imagination had its own limits, however. Through the discussions, it could clearly be observed that there was a temptation to reproduce what was the pre-internet economy, without building on the identified possibilities of networked intelligence and a dematerialisation of knowledge.
The Infobesity Case, a Product for Post-Data Scarcity
This design fiction speculates as to what the consequences might be of the unstoppable rise of data production. Data-driven economies are here regarded as being at saturation point, with too many data having been generated and having to be processed. It has become costly to develop algorithmic services and dedicated places, such as data centres, to manage these massive flows of data. In this context, some people have become data addicts, with all their personal and social activities or rituals depending on data-driven solutions. As a matter of fact, a lot of data coming from these digital junkies are considered meaningless, or even redundant, for big data-driven systems. Information overload then shares a lot of similarity with the problem of obesity, and has, naturally, been termed ‘infobesity’. As a consequence, several start-ups launch products to help in reducing the production and use of data-driven services by data addicts.
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