(@elledog)

You’ll probably agree when I say that as a designer one needs to make stuff up a lot of the time. I struggle with this and love it because, on one hand, I am a vehement believer in the value of research and data (facts), while on the other hand I get butterflies at the prospect of a blank sheet and imagination. Somewhere in between research and imagination is prototyping. Prototyping is a platform for making stuff up so that others can understand it, and it’s a critical part of design.

As a designer, do you ever feel like you’re imagining the end before getting there? This happens to me often, and I’ve been searching for something to me through it. Along came design fiction. I have highly benefited from Julian Bleecker’s writings and ideas about the topic. He says: “design fiction does all of the unique things that science-fiction can do as a reflective, written story telling practice. Like science fiction, design fiction creates imaginative conversations about possible future worlds.” It’s more than writing stories. It’s a tool for prototyping: “Design fiction creates opportunities for reflection as well as active making.”

My challenge was applying this to our own work on a recent project. Describing user needs in the context of personas and scenarios, sure, but design fiction?! All I could think was, “I’m not a sci-fi writer!” But I knew this: design fiction goes further because it allows us to begin imagining end states and creating prototypes in the form of written stories. This was something I wanted to try and I struggled with how to make the shift.

What I found helpful was to start by setting the stage to write a story. We used the metaphor of theatre to think about what we were doing – imagining the entire theatrical stage, with a full set and props, and describing that in detail and then writing an outline for each of the characters that will act on the stage. From there, the next step was to write a script, or a full story, for the characters and environment. It’s almost like stringing personas and their scenarios together into a cohesive, descriptive story that creates a future world. The most interesting part of this was the interplay between imagining and designing. The imagination is like a key that unlocks the possibility to design for the future.

The way that William Gibson writes his characters and describes their environments has been an inspiration to me. He so brilliantly writes, he allows his reader to vividly imagine so that it becomes possible to design for the future. Without reading the story, and in a way, living the future, it is really difficult to design for the future!

We wanted to push design fiction further and put our prototypes to work by using them as tools in focused design activities. A natural extension to design fiction as prototype presented itself: bodystorming. Using our design fiction piece, and getting deeply immersed in the lives of our characters, we led our clients through bodystorming activities. Bodystorming is a technique, described here by Dennis J Schleicher Jr , that involves theatrically acting out scenarios using props, etc. to explore and validate ideas. Through role playing, designers can empathize with the user and begin to physically act out possible futures for them.

Acting out our design fiction via bodystorming was fun and freeing. Much like improv, it built trust between team members as we immersed ourselves in the worlds of our characters, living their stories, and doing what sometimes feels imppossible: role playing possible futures. We weren’t tied to existing technological, organizational or product and service constraints. We were free to live, for a short period of time, in the future and design for it.

For our project, we unearthed a couple of very simple, forward-looking tactical ideas that will help our client design a great user experience. But more than the ideas that emerged, the real benefit was facilitating a mixed group of people to play in the overlap between imagining and designing.