This week: urban transformations in from Chicago to Cyprus, and storytelling using  science fiction.

A group of young designers are exploring how methods used within user-centered design can improve urban regeneration, and are now making their mark on the urban scene of Nicosia, Cyprus, by creatively redesigning “misused public spaces”.

More urban transformation in Chicago where citizens harness technology to offer up solutions to problems in their communities, with the support of the Give a Minute! initiative, created by Jake Barton’s media design firm Local Projects.

Also in Northern Europe they are experimenting urban transformations, as Living Labs have become an established part of local and regional innovation systems. So it became necessary to start benchmarking and harmonizing best practices for setting up and conducting individual Living Lab research.

Storytelling is another big theme this week.

Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson, is a big advocate of using science fiction narratives as a jumping off point for a discussion between management and engineering about the future of Intel’s business, and has commissioned four writers — Douglas Rushkoff, Ray Hammond, Scarlett Thomas and Markus Heitz — to produce science fictional pieces on the future that the company can use in its own planning.

Finally, Digital U is the first television/web series to examine how the internet and social media are changing the way we live, work, play, consume and communicate.

Humans have a natural affinity for stories. We know this intuitively. When we’re trying to teach a child important lessons about ethics, caution and quick-thinking, we don’t work them through a series of Powerpoint slides on the subject in the hope that it will get our point across.

Rather, we tell them the story of Hansel and Gretel. Over the course of the narrative – as the siblings walk through the forest, dropping breadcrumbs, as they get taken in by the cannabilistic witch and then delay their transformation from youngster into dinner until they can turn the tables on their would-be murderer – the young audience engages, empathises, and learns.

Adults have a similar experience when it comes to stories. Whether it is the ancient oral tradition of encoding information about hunting or farming into folktales, or contemporary storytelling developments like management case studies, stories have a way of reaching us that mere description can’t match.

This cognitive resonance is what makes design stories a powerful prototyping tool. People can understand complex concepts underpinning a design more easily if they’re embedded in the narrative form. And there are even more reasons to use stories to prototype your design:

• They can be created right at the beginning of the design process, based on concepts and ideas. No coding or process engineering required – only brainstorming and a bit of writing time (although supporting user research efforts can be extremely valuable inputs).
• Used well, they paint a vivid, holistic picture of a future user experience in a way that users and stakeholders can engage with and empathetically critique.
• They provide context – in a story, the focus is not on the solution (eg a website), but on the users and how they go about interacting with it, to their benefit or peril.

And, incredibly importantly:

• Design stories create a mental “scaffold” for their audience. Once people have understood and embedded the user experience story, you can use that mental model to start adding in complexity. Discussions about business processes, technology, user interfaces can be tied back to the story, to help people make consistent sense of it all.

Planning an example speculative design story

Let’s look at how we’d go about using a design story to speculate on the future user experience – say, showing how some of the major technology and social trends we’re seeing today will change the world in the next decade. To plan out our story, we might first consider a few key storytelling elements:

1. Story coverage and size – what should the story cover, and how big should it be?

In terms of coverage, because the story is going to be speculative, I’ve decided to be a bit ambitious throw in a bunch of trends that I think will be influential in how we live our lives in a decade’s time. These are:

• Crowdsourced personal decision-making (asking your online social networks to help you decide on what to do, both in your personal and professional life)
• Social benchmarking (rating yourself against your online social networks)
  Augmented reality, bolstered by ubiquitous GPS usage (technology knowing where you are I a geospatial sense, and being able to “overlay” what you are seeing with additional information)
• Connected home appliances that are actually useful,
• Further convergence of many information devices into a single device (so that your smartphone, iPad, MP3 player, television etc all become functions of a single gizmo),
• Standards unification turning into integrated services across vendor siloes (so that your experience across the online services you use don’t fragment through the need to sign-on multiple times, duplicate information across services, not have access to data from service A while you’re using service B etc).
• Gestural and eye-tracking interfaces displacing (although not replacing) touch and mouse interfaces (getting UI’s off a screen and more integrated with natural interfaces like your hands and your eyeballs).

As for story size, I’m pretty confident that I can show how the world has changed by telling the story of a single, universal experience – waking up in the morning, and going to work.

2. The narrator – Who is telling the story?

Because the story introduces many new societal and lifestyle concepts, it’s important to focus on the protagonist’s thoughts, motivations and feelings, to help the reader quickly make a connection that will ground the speculative future being canvassed. To achieve this, I’ve decided to write in first person.

3. The protagonist – who is the story about?

I want to make the story about someone that the readers can at least somewhat identify with. So I’ve decided on a character who has certain types of common characteristics (25-35 age bracket, professional, urban, cares about health, relationships and appearance, tech-savvy) without making any of those characteristics come across so strongly that people who fall outside of the aggregate demographic will switch off to “owning” the experience that they’re reading about.

4. “Plot-driven” or “slice-of-life” – how is the story structured?

If I were writing a story about a specific service and its value to the protagonist, I might use a traditional plot-driven story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and where the protagonist faces a conflict that the service being designed helps him/her overcome to achieve his/her goal.

However, I am trying to show how life in general has changed as a result of an accumulation of trends. This makes me lean towards writing the story in the “slice-of-life” mode, where I can show a brief snapshot of a person’s life. I don’t need a plot, or too much context, or for the protagonist to develop over the story’s course – I just need people to give people a sense of what life is like in the “new world” I’m speculating on.

An example of a speculative design story:

So, taking all of that into account, here’s the speculative design story. Interestingly, I’ve had two distinct types reactions from people about it, which I’ll summarise with two actual quotes: “I want this now!”, and “Gee. It sounds like…a nightmare.”

This story could be told using many types of experiences as a basis – visiting a doctor, shopping for groceries, going to dinner. As long as the experience is one the audience can relate to and benchmark against their current state , it’s possible to scaffold the complexity and paint a vision that people can thoughtfully consider.

Regardless of the specifics of the story, the freedom that the storytelling form gives you means that you are only limited by your ability to imagine the world in a way where your ideas – as wildly ambitious as they might be – have played out.

Top image: Pawlowski

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In 1973 the renowned author and member of the so-called ‘Big Three’ of science fiction Arthur C. Clarke decided to put his opinions of successful predictive storytelling into law. Behold his third and most famous law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and modify Clarke slightly to read “Any sufficiently designed interaction is indistinguishable from magic.”

So, what do we think?

In Clarke’s books, 2001 A Space Oddyssey for instance, his writing prowess shone when he was describing deep future technologies. It was critical to him and his contemporaries to make sure that the far out tech was somehow based on the most advanced existing tech of the time, only extrapolated a few decades or centuries. Thus “predictive storytelling”; essentially, taking what we have now, and imagining what it will be in the future, based on extensive knowledge of current research. The better the storyteller, the more magical the future seems.

“If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story, what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre? Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction? Telling stories that appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else?”
- Julian Bleeker of The Near Future Laboratory

Pretend for a second that you can predict the future

In fact, you have just been sent through a mental wormhole 100 years into the future. What do you see? How are people communicating? Traveling? Eating? Now bottle those visions up and bring them back to our present-day with you. Oh, what’s that, you can’t? Why not? The technologies don’t exist, you say? Hmm… Ok, how bout this – come on back and write some stories about it. Or better yet make us a ton of prototypes that each hint at some part of the future! How do you suppose an interaction designer might take on this challenge differently from say Arthur C. Clarke? This is what interests me: predictive art and design that is essentially indistinguishable from magic. I’d like to clarify my meaning of the word “magic” a bit. Historically magic has meant many things, ranging from illusionists’ glamorous stage performances to wizards and witches casting spells. The “magic” I’m referring to is more of an abstract concept I suppose – one that creates a feeling of wonderment in its audience by exhibiting some seemingly impossible or supernatural feats.

The multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE recently delivered some magic to the streets of New York. Consisting of Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw, SWEATSHOPPE “works at the intersection of art, music, and technology” all three of which are resonant in this digital-light-painting evidence video.

More magical interactions

If we push interactions to be more and more magical, they will begin to be indistinguishable from the future and from magic itself. I have been referring to existing examples of this effort as “Fringe Design”. Fringe, as in living on the outskirts of “the ordinary”; pushing the boundaries of the imagination, the visual vernacular, and the plausible, without batting an eyelash. Fringe Design should be embraced for its foretelling abilities – not every crazy technology ridden invention predicts how we will live in the future, but it MIGHT! Julian Bleecker, co-founder of The Near Future Laboratory puts it best in his essay, Design Fiction: “Science fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects — or designed fictions — can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software.” Further on he states that “design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds.”

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns recalls the decades-old dream of realistic, interactive 3D holograms.

They say good design is invisible

What we’re talking about here is the exact opposite (although it may occasionally involve invisibility cloaks or some such related thing). We’re talking about design as spectacle. Art as predictive storytelling. The practicality of this type of work may not seem immediately apparent, but I urge you to think deeper into the future, when the things that these works hinted at decades or centuries ago, are an everyday reality.

Good design is about the voyage

As always, with good design, it’s about the voyage; the process by which the idea evolved. As J.J. Abrams puts it in his article for the April 09 issue of Wired Magazine, “the buildup to a magic trick’s big flourish—is as much of a thrill as the result. There’s discovery to be made and wonder to be had on the journey that not only enrich the ending but in many ways define it.”

Science fiction is largely based on the notion of an alternative future world. Consider this futuristic present the big flourish of the magic trick and everything up until then, the buildup. Since time isn’t restricted to a fixed line in the sense that there is only now and the future, but infinite points in time in between, this journey is happening now and will continue to happen forever. It’s up to designers to consider our role in delivering magical flourishes for the alternate worlds of tomorrow. Without props, there could be no magic trick. That is certainly not to say, however, that by simply having props, you have a magic trick. The props serve as vital, tangible ingredients in the total experience of a trick, but they alone do not add up to a series of interactions that comprise an experience. Claiming such a thing would be to ignore other crucial components such as the magician, the stage and architectural context, the crowd of fellow wonderers around you, and perhaps above all, the theatrical trickery of a good magic show. This is not to say that well considered interaction design MUST employ trickery, but what if it did share more similarities with magic shows? How could we begin to think about designed objects as part of a “service and people” economy the way props are part of a magic performance? Consider the three acts of a classic magic trick (as portrayed in the movie, The Prestige):

• Act 1: The Pledge -  The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course, it probably isn’t.
• Act 2: The Turn – The magician makes his ordinary something, do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it.
• Act 3: The Prestige – This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, in which you see something shocking which you’ve never seen before.

What if designed experiences followed this pattern (minus the life-threatening bits in the third act, of course)? Perhaps designers can integrate aspects of this time tested process into the design of every things. To take users to a new depth of wonderment where anything seems possible.

Arthur C. Clarke knew that science fiction fans were seeking “immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up…”

as Bruce Sterling notes in his essay, Design Fiction. He knew that in order to make his fantasies truly immersive, though, he would have to stay somewhat grounded in contemporary notions of the future, reflecting upon today while extrapolating into tomorrow. To inspire readers to speculate on how things are and wonder how they might become something else. Maybe, even to motivate the designers out there to take charge of defining the steps in between today and tomorrow.

Microsoft plans to have its Project Natal available for Christmas later this year, proving that experience designers ARE working on delivering tomorrow to today’s holiday shoppers. If it works half as well as all the press videos make it look, it will be the most magical gaming system of all time.

Interacting with a thing rarely happens all at once and then is over

It tends to happen over time, or at least can be broken down into a series of interaction events. Each of these events presents an opportunity to elicit the same sense of wonder and joy of a good magic trick, or the end of a great chapter in a science fiction novel. “What will happen next?” the makers of these things want you to ask. “How will this end?” “How does it all work?” Magic and science fiction both typically do a wonderful job at this, but what about design? Why can’t our everyday experiences push our mental boundaries of what is possible today and make us wonder more often – what will tomorrow be like? What will the next century be like? I propose we follow Julian’s lead and “throw out the disciplinary constraints one assumes under the regime of fact” and allow our minds to wander. Wander to a place where robots, ray-guns, time machines, artificial intelligences, nanotechnology, and magic abound. Let us all wander, to tomorrow.

Top image: The Prestige