=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2539/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Human and Data-Driven Design Fictions: Entering the Near-Future Zone
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2539/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-2539
|authors=Alessio Malizia,Raymond Bond,Robin Turkington,Maurice D. Mulvenna
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecce/MaliziaBTM19
}}
==Human and Data-Driven Design Fictions: Entering the Near-Future Zone==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2539/paper1.pdf
Human and Data-Driven Design Fictions:
Entering the Near-Future Zone
Alessio Malizia1 , Raymond Bond2 Robin Turkington2 , and Maurice D.
Mulvenna2
1
School of Creative Arts, University of Hertsfordshire, United Kingdom
2
School of Computing, Ulster University, United Kingdom
Imagine a future where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined
producing a strange new hybrid landscape. Where technologies and data avail-
ability have the potential for virtually unbounded possibilities and participants
are involved in interdisciplinary collaboration for designing future hybrid phys-
ical/virtual environments. New challenging scenarios like smart homes, smart
cities, humanoid robots, and autonomous vehicles are the closest frontier ren-
dering 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 difficulties making their ideas explicit can
arise.
Controlled experiments and classic research methods in Human-Computer In-
teraction are considered to have limitations in their application to P-CE suggest-
ing that newer methods for researching user interactions and future technologies
are needed, e.g. Design Fictions [2]. The designing of complex hybrid environ-
ments must involve the collaboration and expertise of various disciplines and
stakeholders, such as artists, software engineers, interaction and product design-
ers, business managers and policy-makers. Each of them brings with them their
own internalised assumptions and thought processes, making understanding and
discussion between the various parties potentially problematic. Tools and meth-
ods are needed to aid productive dialogue between those involved.
For instance, Science Fiction Prototyping (SFP) is a method that allows engi-
neers, designers or futurists to think about technologies they are developing from
Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Com-
mons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2 A. Malizia et al.
a human perspective, linking the imaginations of product developers and teams
to future users and usage. SFPs are short literary works of fictions, which are
grounded in scientific facts. The purpose of these stories is to start conversations
about the implications, effects or ramifications that technology may have on the
future [9].
This turn towards the use of design fictions require a novel research programme
to address the following challenges:
Public engagement on near-future problems — Alternative, design-fiction in-
spired methodologies helping designers and researchers to elicit reflections on
near-future technologies. For instance, conducting user-based research into al-
gorithms managing autonomous vehicles involves researching a ‘future’ product,
which is yet to fully come into being but that can have a huge impact on soci-
ety in terms of trust, inequality and exclusion. By using a mixture of logic and
fiction, science fiction 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 scientific enquiry [7].
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 scien-
tists, policy-makers and citizens. Therefore, exploring methods such as Design
Fictions [3] or Scenario-based Design [4] will allow participants to transform
concepts into scenarios and prototypes of near-future technologies to study the
implications of introducing such technologies in the society.
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 fictions 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
[1]. Successful solutions must allow the rapid prototyping of algorithms running
on near-future technologies and experiencing the potential implications.
Vision
Ethnography suggests that collaboration can be enabled by shared representa-
tion, these externalised representations add to cognitive processing. The Exter-
nalisation of an individual’s thoughts and ideas via representation in artefacts
can aid communication of those thoughts and ideas.
Human and Data-Driven Design Fictions: Entering the Near-Future Zone 3
The question then becomes: how to inspect other’s thoughts or ideas in an ef-
fective 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 offer
a window into their cognitive and creative process. Our hypothesis is consistent
with research in distributed cognition and the use of artefacts to externalise cog-
nitive models[8,12]. Furthermore, the theory of embodied interaction considers
the materiality of tools as one of the most critical cognitive resources for hu-
man activity [5,11]. Considering cognitive artefacts as a glimpse on participants’
inner design mechanisms has some limitations studied by Collins and Ferguson
(1993): especially in terms of artefacts being too bounded to the context or
scenario proposed in the design session (context bias).
We propose to address such limitation by stimulating rapid prototyping of
Cyber-Physical environments (using a human and data-driven approach) allow-
ing the articulation of artefact at “basic level” of generality following Rosch’s
contribution in prototype theory [13]. We envision a human and data-driven
design fiction method called the “Near-future zone” to explore the design and
development of such emergent hybrid spaces. Such a method is based on a fic-
titious scenario in form of a digitally augmented scenario including roles, props
and objectives set in an alternative reality in the Near-future zone (NFZ). Hu-
mans and data models according to the NFZ fictitious scenario rules will play
their corresponding roles.
Props will be in the form of “proto-tools” [10]: multi-purpose digitally aug-
mented artefacts with no constraints and seemingly limitless uses (e.g. virtual
and augmented reality devices, digitally augmented surfaces and objects, etc.)
that will be modelled on the NFZ fictitious scenario able to interact with par-
ticipants and with data by simulations – Cyber-Physical Interactions.
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
fictitious scenario, there are no experts within the group and therefore the par-
ticipants are equally inexpert independently from their specific knowledge. In
particular, we hope to break the ”every decoding is another encoding” loop
identified by the Deconstruction theory [14]. We think we can break the men-
tal image of the future design, biased by designers’ background, by introducing
the Near-future zone together with the proto-tools. For instance, a scenario can
be designed to stress different structural binary opponent semiotic principles to
break the encoding-decoding loop mentioned above.
Saussure emphasized that meaning arises from the differences between signi-
fiers; these differences are of two kinds: syntagmatic (concerning positioning) and
paradigmatic (concerning substitution). By presenting the designers’ team with
a fictitious 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.
4 A. Malizia et al.
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