Science Fiction Prototyping. Brian David Johnson
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All of this was imagined first in science fiction.
In the 1970s, an entire sub-genre of science fiction sprang up around writers that aligned themselves closely with what many people call the “hard sciences.” What they mean by hard science are things like computer science, astronomy, physics and chemistry. American science fiction author, Alan Steele, defines the subgenre as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone” (Steel, 1992). In the chapter “Becoming an SF author” from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, the authors point out that, “Much of the wonder in hard SF comes from discovering just how wild and fantastic the natural world is. It’s also fun to explore what’s possible for the future of humanity, and this is what hard SF excels at. Some of the possibilities are mindboggling, but hard SF requires that we consider them as real possibilities—things like nanotechnology, genetically engineered immortality, interstellar travel and artificial intelligences that surpass our own” (Doctorow and Schroeder, 2000).
Many critics see hard SF as the only true science fiction because it is based on real science as opposed to pseudoscience or even science fantasy which concerns itself with notions of time travel, extrasensory powers and super heroes. Regardless of where you stand in this debate, it is clear that scientific research, theory and practice have a considerable and sometimes polarizing effect on science fiction.
The 21st century has brought us some fascinating explorations into the specific relationship between science fiction and actual technologies that are being built. Two people who have done some really interesting work in this area are Bell and Dourish. Dr. Genevieve Bell is a cultural anthropologist and head of the Interaction and Experience Lab at the Intel Corporation. Paul Dourish is as professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. In 2009, these two wrote a paper called “Resistance is Futile: Reading Science Fiction and Ubiquitous Computing.” In the paper, they explore how understanding science fiction, in their case popular British and American television shows like Dr. Who and Star Trek, is essential when designing new technologies.
Bell and Dourish think that science fiction can be employed as a tool for design. They think that the futuristic visions expressed in science fiction television shows can be used to understand people’s collective imagining of what future technologies might look like. Looking at Star Trek and Dr. Who and understanding their effect on TV viewers would allow technology developers and software programmers to develop technologies and products that are easily understood and used by people.
Arguably, a range of contemporary technologies—from PDAs to cell phones—have adopted their forms and functions from science fiction. As in the famous case of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clark’s speculative “invention” of the communications satellite, science fiction does not merely anticipate but actively shapes technological futures through its effect on the collective imagination. At the same time, science fiction in popular culture provides a context in which new technological developments are understood. Science fiction visions appear as prototypes for technological environments.” (Dourish and Bell, 2009)
Artist and technologist, Julian Bleecker, takes this idea and runs with it in Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. Bleecker thinks that using science fiction and future visions can be an incredibly productive tool for developing new technologies. He sees the interplay between science fiction and science fact as a fertile ground for the inspiration and creation of physical prototypes, conceptual inventions and actual technology. Bleecker imagines that scientists and technologists could use these prototypes to expand their thinking. Sometimes, the creations can be real functioning devices, but sometimes they can just be wildly new concepts. These prototypes become a design tool that is both real and fake, operational and symbolic, serious and ironic. Bleecker describes them as a “conflation of design, science fact and science fiction…an amalgamation of practices that together bends the expectations as to what each does on its own and ties them together into something new.”
Like Bleecker’s Design Fictions, SF prototypes seek a productive middle ground between fact and fiction. But when we say prototype what exactly do we mean? How are we defining prototype?
WHAT IS A PROTOTYPE?
There is a lot of debate as to what a prototype actually is. The word prototype has different meanings, depending upon the business or market you are talking about. A prototype in software design is wildly different than a prototype to the automotive industry. Both in academia and in the field of design, the definition is hotly debated. There is so much robust discussion and arguing for good reason.
In the technology development process, a prototype is important to the design and development process. This is because in both hardware and software development, there is great uncertainty as to whether a new design will actually do what is desired. The website Wikipedia explains that new designs often have unexpected problems. A prototype is often used as part of the product design process to allow engineers and designers the ability to explore design alternatives, test theories and confirm performance prior to starting production of a new product. Engineers use their experience to tailor the prototype according to the specific unknowns still present in the intended design.
But we are going to take a step back to look at prototypes a bit differently. I believe that a prototype is really just a fiction. A prototype is a story or a fictional depiction of a product. The prototype is not the actual thing that we want to build; it is an example, a rough approximation of the thing we hope to one day build. This works for software just as much as it works for concept cars. Prototypes are not the thing, they are the story or the fiction about the thing that we hope to build. We then use these fictions to get our minds around what that thing might one day be and we also use it to explain together what we hope to build.
Nathan Shedroff has an interesting take on the nature of design and prototypes. Shedroff is the program chair for the California College of Arts’ MBA Strategy in Design program and is the author of several books on design like Experience Design and Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable. He believes that all design is a kind of fiction. On stage at Macworld in 2011, he said that, “Every sketch, model, and prototype is an elaborate fiction on the road to something becoming real. But, it’s still fiction until (and if) it actually gets built. Think of all of the design work left on the drawing board. Every logo, model, variation, and failed prototype was a fiction that didn’t come to be. In truth, all business plans—and planning—are fiction. Anyone who has ever created Proforma financial statements or written a business plan has confronted this. It’s all made-up, even if it’s based on sound assumptions.”
SF prototyping, as a kind of fictional prototyping, provides a new lens through which emerging theories can be viewed differently, explored freely and ultimately developed further. Bleecker makes an excellent observation: “Productively confusing science fact and science fiction may be the only way for the science of fact to reach beyond itself and achieve more than incremental forms of innovation.” (Bleecker, 2009) It is precisely this productive confusion and fusion of fact and fiction that can unlock, broaden and expand the boundaries of current scientific thinking.
TWO EXAMPLES OF SF PROTOTYPES
To get things started let us take a look at two SF prototypes. I have summarized both the stories and the scientific papers and research that went into them. If you want to dive in completely, you can take a look at the complete SF prototypes in Appendix A.
Religious Robots: Trouble at the Piazzi Mine
In 2008, I developed an SF prototype based upon some robotics