Design Futures through Design Fiction

Prof Paul Coulton was invited to give a workshop and lecture at EINA in Barcelona about his work on ‘Designing the Future’. The workshop and lecture concentrated on the speculative design practice of design fiction which can be considered as: (1) creating a fictional world, (2) prototyping something within that fictional world, (3) does so in order to create a discursive space. The practice involves on projecting the trajectories of emerging technologies into a future in which they have become domestic, mundane, and everyday in order for them to appear plausible. The plausibility is important in enabling discussions with a wide audience about such futures. Thus Design Fiction is not concerned with how we might interact with these technologies in the future but how they will affect our lived experience. The slides for Paul’s’ talk are available here