Economic Science Fictions

by Davies, William;

  As one of those many products launched to thrive in a world loaded with data, the ‘infobesity case’ is a shell that promises to reduce your production and use of digital content. Targeting data addicts in the first place, the case provides an incentive for a data diet. The idea is quite simple: the more you use and produce data, the fatter the case gets. The chubbiness of the infobesity case is an indication of the status of your production and use of data. At some point, the shell is intended to become so big that it is actually hard to carry the smartphone with you. Using it for basic operations such as chatting or browsing on social networks is also way more difficult, de facto reducing the use of data (see Figure 12.5).

  The product also bets on public shaming having the effect of pushing people to act upon their data-related activities. Nobody wants to carry a fat smartphone, highlighting that they are a certain cost to society, as they are not responsible enough to manage their relation to data. As for the actual obesity, this statement is partial and incorrect, as the overproduction or overconsumption might have many causes other than the sole uncontrolled will of the person – enforcing the provocative aspect of the fiction. The social pressure is here applied as a strategy to modify individual behaviour for a more mature smartphone use.

  As part of the background of the product, the infobesity case is a segment of a range of untaxed assistance in regulating the quantity and quality of data produced and used. The provotype was presented with a promotional flyer from a ‘datassistance’ start-up developing the infobesity case.

  Figure 12.5 To help discuss the economic implications of data post-scarcity, this design fiction introduces the infobesity case, a smartphone case with the unique feature of getting fatter the more data are used (illustration: Emmanuelle Roulph)

  What have we learned from the discussions prompted by this speculative product?

  On a macro level, having a lot of data seems to implicate a pervasive automation of the economy and the ability to predict everything. Eventually, such a situation could lead to a continuous time, or a kind of atemporality, in which every trend or shift is anticipated and, in the end, doesn’t happen.

  In a data-driven economy propelled by abundance, the supply/demand principle, as we know it, also undergoes profound changes. Participants introduced to the infobesity case design fiction called attention to a possible devaluation of the mass of mundane data in favour of the value of ‘rare data elements’. Highly qualitative data could be a complementary currency, as with the concept of ‘dataxation’. With dataxation, citizens could pay their taxes with their qualitative data in order to help governments automating as well as anticipating and adjusting their policies. Building on this idea, should we be remunerated for the data we produce? Some of the reactions advocated that the market should adopt different levels of regulation and remuneration by differentiating human-made data from machine-made data.

  A whole range of new mini-jobs would be specially created to support the data abundance: data janitors cleaning data, data brokers fixing values, data therapists specialised in digital-related diseases… On a more light-hearted note, it has been recommended that everyone should develop ‘green habits, but for data’, to aid the better management of the data profusion.

  As the insights from the data sniffer and infobesity case suggest it, economic design fictions have serious potential to enhance the ways we engage with each other to discuss and organise changes. Yet it is necessary to take the quality of the context and the deliberate framing of conversations into account. Considering the speculative horizon is especially relevant to contextualise immersions: are we setting the design fictions in five, ten or fifteen years from now? Are we even setting them in the near future or, instead, in an alternative present?

  Furthermore, in this case, our productions have deliberately tended to be satirical and absurdist, but a design fiction project doesn’t necessarily have to have an ironic or tongue-in-cheek feel to it. It can just as well offer a neutral commentary, or even praise. In return, the tone of the fiction will obviously influence the discussion. This is an opportunity to stimulate reactions, as well as running the risk of doors closing.

  Thoughts on the Limits of Economic Design Fictions

  As Design Fiction shows its potential for sparking new interactions among economists, researchers, stakeholders and citizens, we still have to acknowledge the intrinsic limits of the posture.

  A Slider for the Uncanny

  Design fictions are consciously shaped as provocative pieces. In the process of imagining speculative products, however, it is necessary to take care to include points of parity with the current and existing contexts. Design fictions are, by nature, designed products. They have to be relatable and plausible without feeling too weird or too extreme. The undesirable consequence would then be the audience focusing on the product rather on the world it speaks of. In doing so, the design fiction would actually sabotage its very advantage in producing the ‘suspension of disbelief’ necessary to prepare the ground for immersion and discussion. A way to set the right level of weirdness and provocation is by making the design fiction experiential. When organising this type of interactive scenario, the set-up allows participants to touch the products and make choices regarding their uses. To design such a scenario, it requires a coherent narrative background that can be crafted with the guidance of the speculative context canvas.

  An Ecosystem of Design Fictions

  Having a single speculative product might not be sufficient to spark intense debates, as people might focus on the product’s features rather than the context it emphasises. Different Design Fiction experiments, such as the ProtoPolicy mentioned earlier, hint at the good practice of building an ecosystem of fictions. One would have to design several products based on the same resource and initial situation, be it scarcity or post-scarcity. Doing so will better flesh out the various aspects of the speculated society. Indeed, the pieces of fiction can interact with each other, so that many different perspectives can be called upon to cohabit and to disagree with.

  Reframing Discussions

  As seen before, design fictions are a support to discussions, but for economic models it is necessary to settle on a framework of exchanges in terms of questions and reactions. Design fictions are just a starting point for more comprehensive considerations. The intent of framing and orienting the discussions has, in the end, the ambition of extrapolating on the extrapolations. Among the good practices structuring Design Fiction methods, there is the concern to document the reactions of the stakeholders and map them, highlighting convergences and divergences between arguments.

  Nevertheless, it is essential not to focus purely on collecting insights that can be turned instantly into actionable knowledge and stay free from any productive imperative. Being confronted by design fictions is also a process of provocative inspiration, relying on long-term maturation.

  Better to Play with Futures than to Struggle with Them

  As a creative and reflective practice, Design Fiction materialises questionings and challenges status quos about our expectation for the futures of economics. It promotes interdisciplinary discussions to displace debates on imaginary, but tangible, grounds on which long-established and accepted paradigms cannot prevail. By building economic design fictions, one has to make choices by adopting different perspectives from the views experienced on a daily basis. It is not about rehearsing what could possibly happen, but, in some way, it is still close to role-playing – meaning acting by impersonating someone else for a moment and in a particular possible future. And it is well known that people learn and grow best by playing. This is also what it means to find the human scale.

  1Design Friction is a studio based in France producing critical and speculative scenarios to explore sociotechnological changes.

  2I would like to warmly thank my friend and colleague Estelle Hary for her thoughtful feedback and accurate criticism of this chapter.

  3A. Dunne and F. Raby (2013) Speculative Every
thing: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  4B. Sterling (2013) Patently Untrue: Fleshy Defibrillators and Synchronised Baseball are Changing the Future, Wired UK, 11 October.

  5ProtoPolicy (2015) Using Design Fiction to Negotiate Political Questions. Lancaster University: Imagination Lancaster.

  6A. Jain (2013) Design for the New Normal. Superflux.

  7S. Smith (2013) Beware of the Flat-pack Futures. Media Future Week.

  8E. Laurent (2016) Nos Mythologies Economiques.

  13

  Valuing Utopia in Speculative and Critical Design

  Tobias Revell, Justin Pickard and Georgina Voss

  From the post-scarcity economies of Star Trek and Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels to Margaret Atwood’s unfettered free-market capitalism in the Oryx and Crake series and the calorie economics of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, science fiction has a long history of playing with economic concepts and examining the social and cultural effects of a range of different value systems. Each example makes a stake on utopia – either extant, imminent or expired. The plot lines tend to focus on the struggle of maintaining the utopia or working forwards (or backwards) towards it.

  Infrastructure theorist and author Paul Graham Raven divides utopias into three categories: the classical utopia, the technological utopia and the critical utopia.1 The classical utopia is the perfection of institutional and social order, as represented by Thomas More’s original Utopia2 and practised by the communitarians of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century America. The technological utopia is the form most familiar to science fiction, in which humanity’s ills are solved by advances in science and technology – a form that underlies modernist notions of progress and the ‘solutionist discourses of Silicon Valley’. The critical utopia, conversely, ‘undermines the notion of utopia as a deliverable project, but nonetheless clearly values the form as an experimental space for exploring its own consequences and failure-states’. Whereas a dystopia would assume a failed state position from the outset, the critical utopia instead highlights the cracks in the utopian vision to expose its failings. It is here that we find the playground of speculative and critical design.

  Designers Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe speculative and critical design as a means of ‘challeng[ing] narrow assumptions, preconceptions and givens about the role products play in everyday life’.3 This approach assumes that the components of the designed world – products, technologies, services and systems – are materialised with the embedded biases of the social conditions that gestated them. Mobile phones fit in pockets because they were initially designed by men for men, and that history is carried forward through a form factor that remains relatively unchallenged. Speculative and critical design challenges these unquestioned trajectories, with ‘the designed artefact (and subsequent use) and the process of designing such an artefact caus[ing] reflection on existing values, mores and practices in a culture’.4 By projecting changes in social, economic or cultural conditions, then seeking to embody those changes in designed material objects, speculative and critical design creates a strong visceral relationship with its audience that builds on their own lived experience of the material and visual world.

  In the here and now, speculative and critical design practices are most often deployed to challenge and disrupt the hegemonic techno-utopia embodied by today’s technological objects.

  Dunne and Raby’s own project, United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction (2012/13), exploited this technique to great effect, presenting four contrasting socio-economic systems through the lens of transport infrastructure. In United Micro Kingdoms, the United Kingdom has been split into four allegorical political and economic systems: Digitiarians, a society governed by algorithms with a mobile-phone-tariff-style economy; Communo-Nuclearists, a zero-sum communitarian economy based on the near-limitless energy supplied by nuclear power; Bio-Liberals, a techno-utopian social democracy based on synthetic biological technology; and Anarcho-Evolutionists, an anarchist society based on self-augmentation and experimentation. Instead of representing these speculative societies through complex RAND-style diagrams and White Papers, the designers modelled and prototyped the vehicles used by the citizens: driverless robocars for the Digitarians, a nuclear-powered train disguised as landscape for the Communo-Nuclearists, slow biological machine cars for the Bio-Liberals and a communal bicycle for the Anarcho-Evolutionists.

  By drawing parallels with our own experiences of transport – why some people commute by bus while others are driven in limousines, why some jog while others take a taxi – we can begin to draw out the political values of a projected society, and imagine what it might like to live within it. By contrasting the four systems, Dunne and Raby also challenge the idea of a single definitive utopia. In all cases, a trade-off is offered: the wealthier travel in more comfort and convenience in the Digitarian society; the Communo-Nuclearists shoulder the risk of nuclear energy; the Bio-Liberals must live a slow life, waiting for their cars to grow and move; the Anarcho-Evolutionists struggle to travel in one direction, with the young and healthy assuming most of the burden of work.

  James Auger calls this situation of dissonance ‘desirable discomfort’.5 The audience is forced to confront the fact that most technologies do not slip seamlessly into everyday life but operate uncannily – provoking us to adapt our own behaviours to reap the possible benefits of living with the new technology. Pulling back to the macro scale, and questions of speculative social and economic models, Raven argues that speculative and critical design recognises ‘that utopia is always-already subjective: that the good life, and hence the good society, is plural, contested, in perpetual flux’6

  In their project, Dunne and Raby recognised the difficulty of engaging audiences in meaningful discussion about alternative socio-economic models, as opposed to, say, alternative models for a mobile phone. The subject is often too large, complex and divisive. Their strategy was to reduce and simplify the model, using tangible prototypes of allegorical vehicles to prompt and provoke audiences into thinking through the implications of these changes. In this, United Micro Kingdoms supports Auger’s claim that, since designed objects already reflect social and cultural mores, they can also be used as devices with which to map and explore alternative such configurations. While the project’s artefacts ostensibly focused on emergent scientific and technological trajectories – synthetic biology, driverless cars – its framing highlighted the interlocking of economic models along these pathways.

  In the following sections we discuss several other speculative and critical design techniques that have been used to provoke audiences into engaging with alternative economic models, distinguishing between work that uses a more passive documentarian-archivist approach, projects grounded in prefiguration and performance and those more explicitly speculative propositions.

  Documentarians and Archivists

  Much contemporary economic policy is grounded in an ‘evidence-based approach’: the utilisation of scientific methods and language to convey the validity and rigour of policy. Just as the US Declaration of Independence or company incorporation documents can be presented as archived, historical evidence, these projects use the clutter of economic reality – papers, documents, photographs, transcripts, charts and letters – as evidentiary narratives, unravelling the intricacies of an alternative story.

  In 88.7: Stories from the First Transnational Traders (2012), one of us (Revell) extrapolates the tendencies of neoliberal deregulation forward to the brink of the collapse of the state. In this speculative story, an icebreaker ship is recommissioned as a bank, operating as a mobile centre of global high finance, outside the range of state control. Rather than being represented through spectacular imagery or high fantasy, the story is made mundane, told through navigation charts, letters, legal statements and engine designs. Although certain elements are explicitly fantastic – traders begin to sport horn-like growths due to biochemical changes triggered by the extreme conditions
– they are normalised by framing them in the quotidian design language of the everyday.

  Zoe Papadopoulou’s Intel–Cyprus Merger (2008) establishes a situation in which the troubled state of Cyprus is purchased by Intel. This incredible proposal is presented through documents, schematics for a monument, and a corporate pitch from a fake Intel executive. What might initially strike a viewing audience as inconceivable gains plausibility through Papadopoulou’s close attention to technical details and economic data. By doing so, the project uses allegory to approach the vexed question of where we draw the line between state and corporation, slipstreaming unpalatable ideas into believability.

  In Dynamic Genetics vs. Mann (2013) by design studio Superflux, evidence from a fictional court case is laid out through a website and exhibition. In the world depicted, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has turned to genetics-based insurance schemes as a funding model, resulting in a new black market for faked genetic tests as a means of lowering premiums. One participant is caught by the authorities, and his story is told through an exchange of letters, an insurance contract, CCTV screenshots, packaging and an interview tape.

  Again, what might seem like an implausible idea – that insurance and health premiums might be pegged to genetic health data – is given material realism through the mundane ephemera of everyday life. The urgent exchange of letters with health professionals is immediately familiar, as is the visual language of packaging design.

  Projects leaning on practices of archiving and documentation use material ‘evidence’ to offer glimpses of alternative value systems at a particular moment in the fictionalised history of the worlds depicted. They invite audiences to relate the things with which they are confronted to their own experiences of similar material artefacts. As opposed to the genre of the masterplan (discussed below), which takes a top-down approach to proposing alternative systems without really exploring the minutiae of change, these projects present the story allegorically, foregrounding significant artefacts and using archival tactics. They allow the audience to carefully examine the range of evidence and reconstruct the narrative themselves, an active process of reading that sees them speculating as to their own actions relative to the characters involved and assessing the implied trade-offs of the decisions taken by the characters depicted. The audience’s suspension of disbelief is made easier by the fact that they embrace the normalised visual and literary language of social change – paperwork and bureaucracy – rather than the totalising visions of ideology.