Imagine a future where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing a strange new hybrid landscape. Where technologies and data availability have the potential for virtually unbounded possibilities and participants are involved in interdisciplinary collaboration for designing future hybrid physical/virtual environments. New challenging scenarios like smart homes, smart cities, humanoid robots, and autonomous vehicles are the closest frontier rendering a vision of near-future technologies, i.e. Physical-Cyber Environments (P-CE) [6]. Designing for such complex environments will require the involvement of various disciplines, stakeholders and end-users. Data gathered from such collectives and the emerging use of technologies would play an important role in modelling such environments. Introducing methods of collaboration among such a heterogeneous collection of disciplines can however bring with it some communication challenges between those parties involved where di culties making their ideas explicit can arise.
a human perspective, linking the imaginations of product developers and teams
to future users and usage. SFPs are short literary works of ctions, which are
grounded in scienti c facts. The purpose of these stories is to start conversations
about the implications, e ects or rami cations that technology may have on the
future [
This turn towards the use of design ctions require a novel research programme to address the following challenges:
Public engagement on near-future problems | Alternative, design- ction
inspired methodologies helping designers and researchers to elicit re ections on
near-future technologies. For instance, conducting user-based research into
algorithms managing autonomous vehicles involves researching a `future' product,
which is yet to fully come into being but that can have a huge impact on
society in terms of trust, inequality and exclusion. By using a mixture of logic and
ction, science ction prototyping can provide opportunities to reveal aspects
of how technology will be adopted and used that is beyond the scope of more
standard methods of scienti c enquiry [
Methods of cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary communication |Tools and
methods to explore the design and development of such emergent technologies
and algorithms will need to be highly inclusive involving engineers, social
scientists, policy-makers and citizens. Therefore, exploring methods such as Design
Fictions [
Rapid dynamic responses to fast-changing technologies | Design thinking and
design toolkits based on brainstorming activities involving cards and storyboards
have been extensively used to develop design ctions but although informative,
they are quite limited in rendering the implications on future scenarios. We
believe that rapid prototyping can be used as a form of inspecting designers and
stakeholders' thoughts on implications of near-future technologies and algorithms
[
Human and Data-Driven Design Fictions: Entering the Near-Future Zone
The question then becomes: how to inspect other's thoughts or ideas in an
effective and productive way to inform the design of cyber-physical environments.
Our hypothesis is that digitally augmented artefacts spontaneously created by
people to support their own vision of such cyber-physical environments can o er
a window into their cognitive and creative process. Our hypothesis is consistent
with research in distributed cognition and the use of artefacts to externalise
cognitive models[
We propose to address such limitation by stimulating rapid prototyping of
Cyber-Physical environments (using a human and data-driven approach)
allowing the articulation of artefact at \basic level" of generality following Rosch's
contribution in prototype theory [
Props will be in the form of \proto-tools" [
Objectives are set in the NFZ which is a metaphor for known and unknown
abilities and possibilities that technologies may bring in the future. In the NFZ
ctitious scenario, there are no experts within the group and therefore the
participants are equally inexpert independently from their speci c knowledge. In
particular, we hope to break the "every decoding is another encoding" loop
identi ed by the Deconstruction theory [
Saussure emphasized that meaning arises from the di erences between signiers; these di erences are of two kinds: syntagmatic (concerning positioning) and paradigmatic (concerning substitution). By presenting the designers' team with a ctitious scenario on the NFZ we intend to break both the positioning and substituting they might apply normally to interpret the sequence or meaning of such digitally augmented scenarios in order to design for the Near-future zone.