Overview
Design fiction makes props, documents, and prototypes from an imagined near future and presents them as if they were ordinary. The term dates from 2005 (Sterling) and the working method from 2009 (Bleecker). The objects are not predictions. They give a discussion something concrete to work with.Examples
- TBD Catalog (2014), the Near Future Laboratory's product catalog from a near future of drone insurance and algorithmic pet food
- Superflux's Mitigation of Shock (2017), a furnished London flat from the 2050s in which the residents grow their own food
- Superflux's Drone Aviary (2015), five civic drones and their camera footage, shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum
- IKEA's Concept Kitchen 2025 (2015), made with IDEO and students from Lund and Eindhoven
- The Extrapolation Factory's 99 Cent Futures (2013), speculative products stocked on the shelves of a New York dollar store
Origins
Design fiction came out of the mid-2000s, when interaction designers, science fiction writers, and science studies scholars were all looking at how objects carry stories. Its claim is that an object made carefully enough from an imagined world does the work of a narrative without a plot. It belongs to speculative futures but favours credible, everyday scenarios over visionary ones.
The Working Definition
The phrase first appeared in a short book about objects in a world of total tracking, where every product carries its own history and location (Sterling, 2005). The method followed four years later in an essay arguing that design, science fact, and science fiction feed one another, and that designers could make things on purpose that tell stories about possible worlds (Bleecker, 2009). The definition that stuck came in 2012: "the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change" (Sterling). It remains the most used definition because it describes what the objects are for.
Diegetic Prototypes
A diegetic prototype is a technology that exists inside a story world and is treated there as ordinary. The gesture interface in Minority Report (2002), built with working consultants and later cited by real companies as a target, is the standard case (Kirby, 2010; 2011). Inside the film the technology is treated as normal, which is what makes it persuasive. Design fiction applies the same mechanism outside cinema, showing the prototype already in use.
Critical Design
Critical design uses designed objects to ask questions rather than answer them, a position developed from Hertzian Tales (1999) through Speculative Everything (2013) (Dunne and Raby). Design fiction shares the lineage and changes the register. Where critical design tends toward the gallery, design fiction imitates the catalog, the manual, and the news report.
How It Is Made
The working method has three moves: start from a real signal of change, pick a mundane genre of object, and give the artifact enough detail to argue with (Manual of Design Fiction, 2022). Each move is a constraint, and the constraints keep the result grounded in a plausible everyday context.
The Catalog
TBD Catalog (2014) is a product catalog from a near future in the style of SkyMall, listing drone insurance, algorithmic pet food subscriptions, and add-ons for scrubbing yourself from surveillance video. Each item has a price, a product number, and a customer review. The format carries the world: a reader who recognizes a warranty card infers the regulation and the economy around it.
The Mundane
The method's premise is that today's breakthrough is tomorrow's cheap, slightly disappointing product. The insistence on the normal pushes against the utopian and dystopian extremes that dominate futures imagery, because neither extreme shows what everyday use would be like (Nova). A design fiction about self-driving cars might take the form of a parking ticket rather than the car itself.
Fast Props
Because the aim is conversation, a photographed cardboard mock-up or a fake app store listing is enough. Treated as world building, many small artifacts at different scales define a world, and the world rather than any single object is the output (Lindley and Coulton, 2015). An "imaginary abstract" pushes the same economy to its limit: the summary of a study never run, which readers argue with as if it had been (Blythe, 2014). The speed is deliberate. It keeps the method usable within design research workshops without production budgets.
In Exhibitions and Companies
Drone Aviary (2015), shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is five civic drones, among them a traffic enforcement unit and an advertising drone, with footage from their own cameras (Superflux). Mitigation of Shock (2017), first shown at the CCCB in Barcelona, is a furnished London flat from the 2050s in which the residents grow food under lights and cook from improvised recipes; visitors could sit at the table. The flat is persuasive because nothing in it is new; the furniture is ordinary and the changed circumstances appear in the details. Corporations use the same format for positioning. Corning's A Day Made of Glass (2011), Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision videos (2009 and 2011), IKEA's Concept Kitchen 2025 (2015), and Google's internal Selfish Ledger film (2016, leaked in 2018) all present prototypes as already normal. Within speculative computing, the fictional interface is an instrument for seeing what a system would ask of its users. The difference between a design fiction and an advertisement lies in whether the viewer is invited to question the future being shown.
Critiques
The canonical work assumes a European, affluent, usually white subject, and its dystopias describe the present for people elsewhere (Prado de O. Martins and Oliveira, 2014). Whether speculative design has produced political effects to match its exhibition footprint remains an open question (Tonkinwise, 2014). A well-made prototype can make a future look desirable regardless of its content, and the plausibility that makes the method work can normalize a technology before its costs are known. Responses have moved toward the participatory and the situated: futures built with communities, grounded in specific places, and solarpunk attempts to depict futures that are neither corporate nor catastrophic. A recurring question for the method is whose everyday life the fiction takes as its baseline.